Esto perpetua : Algerian studies and impressions

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ESTO PERPETUA

ALGERIAN STUDIES AND IMPRESSIONS

THE READERS' LIBRARY

Uniform with this Volume

Avril. By Hilaikk Bellol. Essays on the Poetry of the French

Renaissance.
Obiter Dicta. By Augustine Birrell. First and Second Scries

complete in one volume.
Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer. By George Bourne.
The Bettesworth Book. By George Bourne.
Studies in Poetry. BySioPFORD A. Brooke, LL.D. Essays on

Blake, Scott, Shelley, Keats, etc.
Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes. By Lin a Eckenstein.

Essays in a branch of Folk-lore.
Italian Poets since Dante. Critical Essays. By W. Everett.
Villa Rubein and Other Stories. By John Galsworthy.
Progress, and Other Sketches. By R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
Green Mansions. A Romance of the Tropical Forest. By W. H.

Hudson.
The Purple Land. By W. H. Hudson.
The Heart of the Country. By Ford .Madox Hueffer.
The Soul of London. By Ford Madox Huekkek.
The Spirit of the People. By Ford Madox Hueher.
After London— Wild England. By Richard Jefi eries.
Amaryllis at the Fair. By Richard Jeiferies.
Bevis. The Story of a Boy. By Richard Jefferies.
The Hills and the Vale. Nature Essays. By Richard Jefferies.
St. Augustine and his Age. An Interpretation. By Joseph

McCabk.
Essays in Freedom. By H. W. Nevinson.
The Strenuous Life, and other Essays. By Theodore Roosevelt.
English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century.

By Sir Leslie Stephen.

Studies of a Biographer. First Series. Two Volumes. Bv Sir

Leslie Stephen.

Studies of a Biographer. Second Series. Two Volumes. By Sir

Leslie Stephen.
Essays on Dante. By Dr. Carl Witte.

DUCKWORTH & CO. LONDON

ESTO PERPETUA

ALGERIAN STUDIES AND IM-
PRESSIONS BY H. BELLOC

AUTHOR OF "THE PATH TO ROME"

LONDON : DUCKWORTH AND CO.

3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

First Published 1 906
Issued in The Readers' Library 19 1 1

A /I rights reserved

TO

E. S. P. HAYNES

INTRODUCTION

i_ Once, in a village that over-

i^- looked the Mediterranean, I

saw a man working in an
open shop, fitting together a builder's Orna-
ment which was to go upon the ridge-end of
some roof or other. He was making the base
of the Ornament so as to fit on to a certain
angle of the rafters, and the Ornament itself
was a Cross. It was spring-time, and he was
singing.

I asked him for whom he was making it.
He answered, for a man who had ordered it
of him over-sea in Algiers.

But another Ornament also stood by,
carved in the same way, and similar in
size. I asked him for whom he had

Introduction

finished that other, and he said, " For the same
man over-sea : he puts them upon buildings."
This second Ornament, however, happened
to be a Crescent.

The contrast moved me to cross the sea,
to understand the land upon the ^i

further shore, and to write upon 9

Africa some such little historical _X
essay as follows.

When a man first sees Africa, if it is
just before the rising of the sun, he per-
ceives, right up against a clean horizon,
what appear to be islands standing out
distinct and sharp above the sea.

At this hour a wind is often blowing
from the eastward, and awakens the Medi-
terranean as though it came purposely at
dawn to make the world ready for the morn-
ing. The little waves leap up beneath it,
steep towards their shadows, and the bows
of the ship that had surged all night through
a rolling calm begin, as sailors say, to

The Landfall

" speak " : the broken water claps and
babbles along the side. In this way, if he
has good fortune, the traveller comes upon
a new land. It is that land, shut off from
all the rest between the desert and the
sea, which the Arabs call the Island of the
West, the Maghreb, but to which we in
Europe for many hundred years have given
the name of Barbary : as it says in the
song about freedom :

" . . . as large as a Lion reclined
By the rivers of Barbary."

It is the shore that runs, all built upon a
single plan, from Tunis and the Gulf of
Carthage to Tangier ; that was snatched
from Europe in one great cavalry charge
twelve hundred years ago, and is now at
last again in the grasp of Europe.

For many hours the traveller will sail
towards it until at last he comes to a belt
of smooth water which, in such weather,
fringes all that coast, and then he finds

The Roads

that what he saw at morning was not a Une
of islands, but the tops of high hills standing
in a range along the sea : they show darker
against a stronger light and a more southerly-
sun as he draws nearer, and beyond them
he sees far off inland the first buttress
mountains which hold up the plateaux of
Atlas.

The country which he thus approaches
differs in its fortune and history from all
others in the world. The soil and the rehef
of the Maghreb, coupled with its story,
have made it peculiar and, as it were, a
symbol of the adventures of Europe. Ever
since our western race began its own life
and entered into its ceaseless struggle against
the East, this great bastion has been held
and lost again ; occupied by our enemies
and then taken back as our power re-arose.

3

The Character

The Phoenician ruled it ; Rome wrested it
back ; it fell for the last time when the
Roman Empire declined ; its reconquest
has been the latest fruit of our recovery.

It is thoroughly our own. The race that
has inhabited it from its origin and still
inhabits it is our race ; its climate and
situation are ours ; it is at the furthest
limit from Asia ; it is an opposing shore of
our inland sea ; it links Sicily to Spain ;
it retains in every part of it the Menhirs
and the Dolmens, the great stones at which
our people sacrificed when they began to
be men : yet even in the few centuries
of written history foreign gods have twice
been worshipped there and foreign rulers
have twice held it for such long spaces of
time that twice its nature has been forgotten.
Even to-day, when our reoccupation seems
assured, we speak of it as though it were
by some right originally Oriental, and by
some destiny certain to remain so. During

4

OF Barbary

the many centuries of our decline and of
our slow resurrection, these countries were
first cut off so suddenly and so clean from
Christendom, next steeped so long and so
thoroughly in an alien religion and habit of
law, that their very dress and language
changed ; and until a man has recognised at
last the faces beneath the turbans, and has
seen and grown familiar with the great build-
ings which Rome nowhere founded more
solidly than in these provinces, he is deceived
by the tradition of an immediate past and
by the externals of things : he sees nothing
but Arabs around him, and feels himself an
intruder from a foreign world.

Of this eastern spirit, which is still by
far the strongest to be found in the states of
Barbary, an influence meets one long before
one has made land. The little ships all up
and down the Mediterranean, and especially
as one nears the African coast, are in their
rig and their whole manner Arabian.

5

The Normal Sail

There is a sort of sail which may
be called the original of all sails. It is the
sail with which antiquity was familiar. It
brought the ships to Tenedos and the Argo
carried it. The Norwegians had it when
they were pirates a thousand years ago.
They have it still. It is nearer a lug-sail
than anything else, and indeed our Deal
luggers carry something very near it. It is
almost a square sail, but
7-< the yard has a slight rake

/ and there is a bit of a

peak to it. It is the
"~- kind of sail which

seems to come first into
the mind of any man when he sets out
to use the wind. It is to be seen continually
to-day hoisted above small boats in the
north of Europe.

But this sail is too simple. It will
not go close to the wind, and in those
light and variable airs which somehow

6

The Lateen

have no force along the deck, it hangs
empty and makes no way because it has
no height.

Now when during that great renais-
sance of theirs in the seventh century the
Arabs left their deserts and took to the sea,
they became for a short time in saiHng, as
in philosophy, the teachers of their new
subjects. They took this sail which they
had found in all the ports they had con-
quered along this coast — in Alexandria,
in Cyrene, in Carthage, in Caesarea — they
lightened and lengthened the yard, they
lifted the peak up high, they clewed down
the foot, and very soon they had that tri-
angular lateen sail which will, perhaps,
remain when every other evidence of their
early conquering energy has disappeared.
With such a sail they drove those first
fleets of theirs which gave them at once
the islands and the commerce of the Medi-
terranean. It was the sail which permitted

7

The Lateen

their invasion of the northern shores and
the unhappy subjection of Spain.

We Europeans have for now some
seven hundred years, from at least the Third
Crusade, so constantly used this gift of
Islam that we half forget its origin. You
may see it in all the Christian harbours
of the Mediterranean to-day, in every
port of the Portuguese coast, and here
and there as far north as the Channel.
It is not to be seen beyond Cherbourg,
but in Cherbourg it is quite common.
The harbour-boats that run between the
fleet and the shore hoist these lateens.
Yet it is not of our own making, and, indeed,
it bears a foreign mark which is very distinct,
and which puzzles every northerner when
first he comes across this sail : it reefs along
the yard. Why it should do so neither
history nor the men that handle it can
explain, since single sails are manifestly
made to reef from the foot to the leach.

Its Reefing

where a man can best get at them. Not so
the lateen. If you carry too much canvas
and the wind is pressing her you must
take it in from aloft, or, it must be supposed,
lower the whole on deck. And this foreign,
quaint, unusual thing which stamps the
lateen everywhere is best
seen when the sail is put
away in harbour. It does
not lie down along the
deck as do ours in the
north, but right up along
the yard, and the yard
itself is kept high at the masthead, making
a great bow across the sky, and (one would
say) tempting Providence to send a gale
and wreck it. Save for this mark — which
may have its uses, but seems to have none
and to be merely barbaric — the lateen is
perfect in its kind, and might be taken
with advantage throughout the world (as it
is throughout all this united sea) for the

9

The Little Ships

uniform sail. For this kind of sail is, for
small craft, the neatest and the swiftest
in the world, and, in a general way, will
lie closer to the wind than any other. Our
own fore-and-aft rig is nothing else but a
lateen cut up into mainsail, foresail, and jib,
for the convenience of handling.

The little ships, so rigged, come out like
heralds far from the coast to announce
the old dominion of the East and of the
religion that made them : of the united
civilisation that has launched them over
all its seas, from east of India to south of
Zanzibar and right out here in the western
place which we are so painfully recovering.
They are the only made thing, the only
form we accepted from the Arab : and we
did well to accept it. The little ships are a
delight.

You see them everywhere. They belong
to the sea and they animate it. They are
similar as waves are similar : the}^ are

The Little Ships

different as waves are different. They
come into a hundred positions against the
hght. They heel and run with every mode
of energy.

There is nothing makes a man's heart
so buoyant as to see one of the Httle ships

bowling along

wards him,

wind and

behind

ing over

It seems

borrowed

of the air and

breast-high to-

w i t h the

the clouds

it, career-

the sea.

' to have

something

something of

the water, and to unite them both and to be
their offspring and also their bond. When
they are middle-wa}^ over the sea towards
one under a good breeze, the little ships are
things to remember.

So it is when they carry double sail and
go, as we say of our schooners, " wing and
wing." For they can carry two sails when

The Little Ships

the wind is moderate, and especially when
the vessel is running before it, but these two
sails are not carried upon two masts, but
both upon the same mast. The one is the
common or working sail, carried in all

weathers. The other is a sort of spinnaker,
of which you may see the yard lying along
decks in harbour or triced up a little by the
halyard, so as to swing clear of the hands.

When the little ships come up like this
with either sail well out and square and their
course laid straight before the general run
of a fresh sea, rolling as they go, it is as
though the wind had a friend and companion
of its own, understanding all its moods,
so easily and rapidly do they arrive towards

The Little Ships

the shore. A Uttle jib (along this coast at
least) is bent along the forestay, and the dark
line of it marks the swing and movement of
the whole. So also when you stand and look
from along their wake and see them leaving
for the horizon along a slant of the Levantine,
with the breeze just on their quarter and
their laden hulls careening a trifle to leeward,
you would say they were great birds, born
of the sea, and sailing down the current
from which they were bred. The peaks of
their tall sails have a
turn to them like the
wing-tips of birds, espe-
cially of those darting
birds which come up to
us from the south after winter and shoot
along their way.

Moreover the sails of these little ships
never seem to lose the memory of power.
Their curves and fulness always suggest a
movement of the hull. Very often at sunset

13

The Little Ships

when the dead calm reflects things unbroken
Hke an inland pond, the topmost angle of
these lateens catches some hesitating air
that stirs above, and leads it down the sail,
so that a little ripple trembles round the
bows of the boat, though all the water
beside them is quite smooth, and you see

her gliding in without oars.

She comes along in front of

the twilight, as gradual and
as silent as the evening,
and seems to be impelled

by nothing more substantial
than the advance of darkness.

It is with such companions to proclaim the
title of the land that one comes round under
a point of hills and enters harbour.

To comprehend the accidents which
have befallen the Maghreb it is necessary to
consider its position and the nature of the
boundaries which surround it. In order to

14

The Mediterranean

do this one must see how it stands with
regard to the Mediterranean and to the
Desert.

Here is a rough map on which are indi-
cated the shores of that sea, and to appre-
ciate its scale it is easiest to remember

that its whole length from the Straits of
Gibraltar at M to the Levantine coast at A
is well over 2000 miles. In this map those
shores which are well watered and upon
which men can build cities and can live are
marked black. The great desert beyond to
the south, which perpetually threatens the

15

The Mediterranean

further shore and in which men can only
live here and there in httle oases of watered
land is marked with sloping lines.

It is easy to see how this great surrounded
water nourished the seeds of our civilisation :
why all the influences we enjoy here in the
north came upwards to us from its harbours :
why Asia stretched out towards it in order
to learn, and attempted (but always failed)
to absorb it. It is so diversified by great
peninsulas and very numerous islands that
the earliest sailors need never miss the land :
it has so indented and varied a coast that
harbours are nowhere lacking to it. Its
climate is of that kind best suited to men,
yielding them fruits and warmth with some
labour, but not so hardly as to sour them
into brutality nor so cheaply as to degrade
them by indolence. The separate homes in
which polities can grow up separately and
cherish their separate lives, were fortified
by the sea which protected its archipelagoes

i6

The Mediterranean

and its long tongues of land, and were further
guarded by the many mountain chains which
so affect the horizons all along these coasts
that almost every landfall you make as you
sail is some very high, and often sacred,
hill. But all this difterence was permitted
to interact upon itself and to preserve a
common unity by the common presence of
the sea. If it be true, as the wisest men
have said, that everything comes from salt
water, then nowhere in the world could the
influence of the sea do more to create and
feed the aspirations of men. Whether our
race came thither from the north and east,
or, as is more probable, from the African
shore, this much is certain, that there grew
up round the Mediterranean, Europe, which is
Ourselves.

At one part things alien to us impinge upon
this sea ; this part is the eastern bay which
is marked off upon the map wdth a dotted
line and the shores of which are the outposts.

77 B

The Phcenicians

of Asia and of the Egyptians. The projection
on the south is that delta of the Nile from
which Egypt looked out jealously against
rivals whom she despised or ignored : the
long Levantine coast which blocks the east-
ern end of the whole sea was alive with the
essence of the Asiatic spirit : with the subtlety,
the yielding and the avarice of the Phoenician
cities. Egypt may have attempted something
westward : there is a legend of struggles
with a fair people, and to this day in the
salt marshes south of Tunis a group of date-
trees, abandoned and unplucked, are called
the " Dates of Pharaoh " and resemble no
dates of that country, but the dates of the
Nile valley. But if such expeditions were
made they were fruitless. The desert was
still a secure boundary for us : the first
attack which Europe was to suffer came not
from the sands, but from its own sea, and
the first conquerors of the Maghreb were the
Phoenicians.

1 8

The Phcenicians

This people were Orientals, like any
others ; but they had, as it were, specialised
upon one most notable character of their race,
which is to accumulate wealth by negotia-
tion, and to avoid as far as may be the
labour of production. To no other family of
men has toil appeared to be a curse save to
that of which the Phoenicians were members ;
nor are fatigues tolerable to that family
save those endured in acquiring the posses-
sions of others and in levying that toll
which cunning can always gather from mere
industry. Of all effort travel alone was con-
genial to them, and especially travel by sea,
which, when they had first developed it,
became for man}^ centuries their monopoly
and gave them the carrying of the world and
the arbitrament of its exchanges. They
dwelt in a small group of harbours on that
extreme eastern shore of the Mediterranean,
where a narrow strip of fertile land lay
between them and the mountains. They

19

The Phcenicians

sailed out before the steady northerly and
easterly winds of summer, (which are but a
portion of the Trade Winds;) they pushed
from headland to headland and from island
to island, bringing into economic contact
the savage tribes and the wealthy states,
passionate especially for metals, but carefuU}^
arranging that there should arise between
the nations whom they exploited or served
no such direct bond as would exclude their
own mediation. Three thousand years ago
their language was reflected in the names of
half the landmarks and roadsteads of the
sea — later the Greeks attempted to explain
these names by punning upon their sound in
some Greek dialect and fitting to each some
fantastic legend.

As the Asiatics ran thus westward before
the summer gales, their path was barred at
last by the eastern shore of Barbary.

It is curious to note how specially
designed was this coast, and especially its

20

The Phoenicians

north - eastern promontories, for the first
landing-place of Asiatics upon our shores.
The recess which is marked upon the map
with an X and which is now called the
Gulf of Tunis was designed in every way

to arrest these merchants and to afford them
opportunities for their future dominion.

They had sounded along the littoral of
the desert : they were acquainted with the
harbours which led them westward along
the Libyan beach and with the little terri-
tories which were besieged all round by the
sand and drew their life from the sea : where

The Bay of Carthage

later were to rise Cyrene and Berenice and
Leptis.

They had seen the mirage all along that
hot coast, and bare sandhills shimmering-
above shallow roadsteads : they had felt
round the lesser Syrtis for water and a
landing-place and had found none, when the
shore-line turned abruptly east and north
before them. It showed first the rank grass
of a steppe ; it grew more and more fertile as
they advanced : at last, as they rounded the
Hermaean promontory, they opened a bay,
the mountainous arms of which broke the
Levanter and whose aspect immediately
invited them to beach their keels.

It stands at the narrow passage between
the eastern and the western basins of the
Mediterranean ; and the western basin had
not as yet been visited (it would seem) by
men capable of developing its wealth. This
bay upon which the Tyrians landed was
sheltered and deep : there was, as in their

22

'' Afrigya"

own country, a belt of fertile soil between
the shore and the mountains ; the largest river
of Barbary was to hand. Their first settle-
ments, of which Utica, near Porto Farina,
was perhaps the earliest, began the new ex-
pansion of the Phoenician people. They
called the shore their " Afrigya " — that is,
their " colony," The word took root and
remained. It was in this way that Asia, much
older than we are, much more wily, not so
brave, came in as a merchant and crept along
till she found, and landed on, the Maghreb,
where it stands out across the entry to the
western seas.

When these first African cities had been
founded for some centuries, there was built
on the same gulf and at its head — perhaps as
a depot for Utica, more probably as a refuge
for Tyrian exiles — a city called " The New
Town " : it is of this title, whose Semitic
form must have resembled some such sound
as " Karthadtha," that the Greeks made

23

Carthage

Carchedon and the Latins Carthago, and it
was from this centre that there arose and
was maintained for seven hundred years over
the Western Mediterranean an Oriental in-
fluence which was always paramount and
threatened at certain moments to become
universal and permanent.

Our race was not then conscious of itself.
Gaul, Spain, the Alps and Italy north of the
Apennines were a dust of tribes, villages and
little fortified towns to which there was not
to be given for many centuries the visible
unity which we inherit from Rome. Rome
itself was not yet walled. Southern Italy,
though far more wealthy, was divided, and as
for Africa it was full of roving men, Berbers, to
whom some prehistoric chance, coupled with
their soil and climate, had bequeathed such
horses and such a tradition of riding as their de-
scendants still possess. These savages must
have felt in their blood that the Greek colonies,

(when such towns were planted among them,)

24

Carthage

were of their own family and worshipped
gods whom they could understand; just as,
much later, they learnt to accept quite easily
the kindred domination of the Italians : but
the western instinct was still far too vague to
permit of any coalition, or to react with an}^
vigour against the newcomers from the east.
It was not till travel, increasing wealth and
the discipline of government had permitted
the nomads to know themselves for Europeans
that the presence of the foreigner became first
irksome and then intolerable. It was not
till nearly seven hundred years had passed
that Rome, the centre and representative
of the West, first conquered and then obliter-
ated the power of Asia in this land.

Meanwhile Carthage grew pre-eminent,
and as she grew, manifested to the full the
spirit which had made her. Her citizens
sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar ;
they knew the African and the Iberian
coasts of the Atlantic. They may have

Carthage

visited Britain, They crossed Gaul. It is
said that they saw the Baltic. And every-
where they sought eagerly and obtained the
two objects of their desire : metals and
negotiation. In this quest, in spite of them-
selves, these merchants, who could see nothing
glorious in either the plough or the sword,
stumbled upon an empire. Their constitu-
tion and their religion are enough to explain
the fate which befell it.

They were governed, as all such states
have been, by the wealthiest of their citi-
zens. It was an oligarchy which its enemies
might have thought a mere plutocracy ; its
populace were admitted to such lethargic
interference with public affairs as they might
occasionally demand ; perhaps they voted :
certainly they did not rule ; and the whole
city enjoyed (as all such must enjoy) a
peculiar calm. Civil war was unknown to
it, for its vast mass of poorer members

could not even be armed in the service of

26

Carthage

their country, save at a wage, and certainly
had no mihtary aptitudes to waste upon
domestic quarrels. To such a people the
furious valour of Roman and Greek disturb-
ance must have seemed a vulgar anarchy, nor
perhaps could they understand that the States
which are destined alternately to dominate
the world by thought or by armies are in every
age those whose energy creates a perpetual
conflict within themselves. It was character-
istic of the Carthaginians that they depended
for their existence upon a profound sense of
security and that they based it upon a com-
plete command of the sea. It was their
contention that since no others could (to
use their phrase) '* wash their hands " in
the sea without the leave of Carthage, their
polity was immortal. They made no attempt
to absorb or to win the vast populations from
whom they claimed various degrees of alle-
giance. The whole Maghreb, and, later, Spain

as well; the islands, notably the Balearics

27

Carthage

and Sardinia^ were for them mere sources of
wealth and of those mercenary troops which,
in the moment of her fall, betrayed the town.
When they contemplated their own great-
ness their satisfaction must have reposed
upon the density of their population — their
walls may have held more than half a million
souls at a time when few towns of the west
could count a tenth of such a number —
upon their immemorial security from inva-
sion, upon the excessive wealth of their
great families (whose luxury the whole nation
could contemplate with a vicarious satisfac-
tion), upon the solidity of their credit, the
resources of their treasury, and, above all,
upon the excellent seamanship, the trained
activity, and the overwhelming numbers of
their navy.

As for their religion, it was of that dark
inhuman sort which has in various forms
tempted, and sometimes betrayed, ourselves.

Gods remote and vengeful, an absence of

28

Carthage

those lesser deities and shrines which grace com-
mon experience and which attach themselves
to local affections : perhaps some awful and
unnamed divinity; certainly cruelty, silence
and fear distinguished it. Even the goddess
who presided over their loves had something
in her at once obscene and murderous.

It is natural to those who are possessed
by such servile phantasies that their worship
should mix in with the whole of their lives
and even penetrate to an immoderate degree
those spheres of action which a happier and
a saner philosophy is content to leave un-
trammelled. These dreadful deities of theirs
afforded names for their leaders and served
for a link between the scattered cities of
their race : the common worship of Melcarth
made an invisible bond for the whole Phoeni-
cian world ; the greatest of the Carthaginian
generals bore the title of " Baal's Grace."

With this gloomy and compelling faith

and with this political arrangement there

29

Carthage

went such a social spirit as such things will
breed. Not only were the Carthaginians
content to be ruled by rich men always,
but the very richest were even too proud
for commerce ; they lived as a gentry upon
land and saw, beneath the merchants who were
their immediate inferiors (and accustomed,
it may be presumed, to purchase superior
rank) a great herd of despicable and never
laborious poor — incapable of rebellion or of
foreign service. The very fields around the
city were tilled, not by the Carthaginians,
but by the half-breeds who had at least in-
herited something of western vigour and
application.

When the crowd within the walls was
too great, a colony would spring from its
overflow into some distant harbour : emi-
grants led by one of those superiors without
whom, as it seemed, the Phoenician was
unable to act. It would appear that
these daughter-nations were as averse to

30

Carthage

military sacrifice as their parent, and that
they depended for their protection upon
no effort of their own, but upon the fleet
and the treasury of Carthage. In this way
was built up a vast domain of colonies,
tributaries and naval bases which was spo-
radic and ill organised in plan, enormous in
extent, and of its nature lacking in perma-
nence.

No system more corrupt or more mani-
festly doomed to extinction could be con-
ceived, nor is it remarkable that when
that system disappeared not a trace of it
should remain among the millions whom it
had attempted to command. Carthage had
not desired to create, but only to enjoy :
therefore she left us nothing. Her very
alphabet was borrowed from our invention.
Of seven hundred years during which the
Asiatics had dominated Barbary nothing is
left. The extinction of their power was
indifferent or pleasing to the Mediterranean

31

Carthage

they had ruled ; their language dwindled on
through five hundred further years — its litera-
ture has been utterly forgotten. A doubtful
derivation for the names of Cadiz, of Barce-
lona, and of Port Mahon, a certain one for
Carthagena, are all that can be ascribed to-
day to this fanatic and alien people : for they
came of necessity into conflict with the Power
that was to unify and direct the common
forces of Europe.

At first the expansion of Carthage met
with nothing more than could amuse its
facile energies and increase its contemptuous
security : it judged, exploited, or subsidised
the barbaric tribes of Africa and Spain and
Sardinia ; it wrangled with the Greek colonies
whom perhaps it thought itself " predestined "
to rule — for to prophesy was a weakness
in the blood from which it sprang. Some
two centuries and a half before our era,
when these Orientals had had footing for
near a thousand and Carthage an existence

32

The Roman Attack

of six hundred years, Rome moved to the
attack.

Rome had already achieved and was
leading a confederation of the Italian
peoples, she had already stamped her char-
acter and impressed her discipline upon the
most advanced portion of the west, she had
for a full generation minted that gold into coin,
when she became aware that a city \vith whom
she had often treated and whom she had
thought remote, was present : something alien,
far wealthier than herself, far more numerous
and boasting a complete hold of communica-
tions and of the western sea. Between the
two rivals so deep a gulf existed that the
sentiment of honour in either was abhorrent
or despicable to the other.

The Roman people were military. They
had no love for ships. The sea terrified
them : their expansion was by land and
their horror of the sea explains much of
their history. The very boast of maritime

33 c

The Punic Wars

supremacy that Carthage made was a sort
of challenge to their genius. They accepted
that challenge and their success was com-
plete. Within a hundred years they had
first tamed and then obliterated their rival,
and the Maghreb re-entered Europe.

The first accidents of that conflict were
of such a nature as to confirm Carthage in
her creed and to lead her on to her destiny.
She found, indeed, that the command of
the sea was a doubtful thing : the landsmen
beat her in the first round ; clumsily and in
spite of seamanship. But when, as a conse-
quence of such defeat, they landed upon the
African soil which she had thought inviolable,
there, to her astonishment, she overwhelmed
them. The loss of Sicily, to which she con-
sented, did nothing to warn her. She be-
came but the greater in her own eyes : Sicily
she replaced by a thorough hold upon Spain,
an expansion the more imperial that the new
province was more distant and far larger,

34

The Punic Wars

and indefinitely more barbarous than the last.
It may be imagined what a bitter patriotism
the surprises of the early struggle had bred
in the governing class of Carthage. From
the moment when, in their unexpected victory,
they had burnt the Roman soldiers alive to
Moloch, this aristocracy had determined upon
a final defeat of Rome. The greatest of them
undertook the task and undertook it not from
the Mother Country but from the Empire.
He marched from Spain.

The Second Punic War is the best known
of campaigns. Every Roman army that took
the field was destroyed, the whole of Italy
was open to the army of Hannibal, and
(wherever that army was present — but only
there) at his mercy. In spite of such miracles
the Phoenician attempt completely failed. It
failed for two reasons : the first was the
contrast between the Phoenician ideal and
our own ; the second was the solidarity of
the western blood.

35

The Failure

The army which Hannibal led recognised
the voice of a Carthaginian genius, but it
was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it
was paid. Even those elements in it which
were native to Carthage or her colonies
must receive a wage, must be " volunteer" ;
and meanwhile the policy which directed the
whole from the centre in Africa was a trading
policy. Rome " interfered with business " ; on
this account alone the costly and unusual
effort of removing her was made.

The Europeans undertook their defence
in a very different spirit : an abhorrence of this
alien blood welded them together : the allied
and subjugated cities which had hated Rome
had hated her as a sister. The Italian con-
federation was true because it reposed on
other than economic supports. The European
passion for military glory survived every
disaster, and above all that wholly European
thing, the delight in meeting great odds, made
our people strangely stronger for defeat,

36

OF Carthage

The very Gauls in Hannibal's army, for all
their barbaric anger against Rome, were
suspected by their Carthaginian employers,
and in Rome itself an exalted resolve, quite
alien to the East and disconcerting to it, was
the only result of misfortune.

Beyond the Mediterranean the Berber
nomads, whose vague sense of cousinship with
the Italians was chiefly shown in their con-
tempt for the merchant cities, harassed Carth-
age perpetually ; and when at last the Roman
armies carried the war into Africa, Carthage
fell. For somewhat more than fifty years
she continued to live without security of
territory or any honour, harassed by the
nomad kings whom she dared not strike
because they were the allies of Rome. She
was still enormous in her wealth and
numbers, it was only her honour that was
gone ; if indeed she had ever comprehended
honour as did her rival.

The lapse of time brought no ease.

37

The Destruction

There was something in the temper of
Asia that was intolerable to the western
people. They saw it always ready to give
way and then to turn and strike. They
detested its jealous and unhappy rites. Its
face was hateful and seemed dangerous to
them. The two great struggles, at the close
of which Rome destroyed as one destroys a
viper, were conducted against members of the
same family, Carthage and Jerusalem. A pre-
text was chosen : Carthage was abject, yielded
three hundred hostages, and even all her
arms. Only the matter of her religion
moved her and the order to remove the
site of the town. To this Carthage opposed
a frenzy which delayed for three years the
capture of the city ; but when it was taken it
was utterly destroyed. Every stone was re-
moved, the land was left level, and suddenly,
within a very few years of that catastrophe,
every influence of Carthage disappeared.
It was in this way that the first great

38

OF Carthage

power of the Orient upon the Maghreb was
extinguished.

This final act of Rome was accompHshed
within a hundred and fifty years of the
Nativity. The hfe of a man went by, and
Uttle more was done. It was close upon
our era before the Roman habit took root in
Africa, a century more before the Maghreb
was held with any complete organisation.
By the middle of the fifth century the Vandals
had come in to ruin it.

There were, therefore, but little more
than three hundred years during which Rome
was to bring up this land into the general
unity of Western Europe. There is no other
portion of the world Rome governed, not even
Southern Gaul, where her genius is more
apparent. In that short interval of day-
light— a tenth of the known history of the
Maghreb — Rome did more than had Carthage
in seven hundred years and more than was
Islam to do in seven hundred more.

39

The Roman Monuments

It is indeed the peculiar mark of Bar-
bary, which makes it a scene of travel differ-
ent from all others, that

everywhere . . . 1 j' 'f^^r the

huge -C V^^fc/ >U->^^-r-^ monu-

r of

stand
complete
tion. If civi-
had been
ous here as
been in
every city
rope, Af-
would not
one in this
ion. Or if a
active and laborious,
quarried these stones
to build new towns, their aspect would be
more familiar, because in Europe we are
accustomed to such decay and it helps us to

40

The Amphitheatre

forget the vast foundation of Rome. But to
find it here, sometimes in the desert, nearly
always in a solitude ; to round a sandy hill
without trees or men and to come, beyond
a dry watercourse, upon these enormous evi-
dences of our forerunners and their energy,
is an impression Europe cannot give.

On the edge of the Sahara, in the very
south of Tunis, where the salt of the waste
is already upon one, there stands an arena
of appalling size. It is smaller, but only a
little smaller, than the Coliseum : it seems,
in the silence and the glare, far larger. The
Romans built it in their decline. You might
as you watch it be in Rome or in Nimes or
in Aries, but you look around you and see
the plain, and then the ruin grows fantastically
broad and strong. Mountains are greatest
when one wakes at morning and sees them
unexpectedly after a long night journey ;
when the last sight one had by sunset was
of low hills and meadows. So it is with

41

The Roman Planting

these ruins in Africa. The silence and the
lonehness frame them. They are sudden,
and when they have once been seen, especially
by a man who wanders in that country on
foot and does not know what marvel he
may not find at the next turn of the path,
they never afterwards leave the mind.

The things Rome did in Barbary were
these : Of agriculture, which had been ex-
ceptional, despised by the cavalry of the
mountains and confined to the little plains
at the heads of the harbour-bays, she made
a noble and, while she ruled, a perma-
nent thing. Indeed it is one of the tests
of the return of Europe to her own in the
Maghreb that with the advance of our race,
corn and vineyards advance, and with our
retreat they recede. Rome planted trees
which brought and stored rain. She most
elaborately canalised and used the insufhcient
water of the high plateaux. She established
a system of great roads. Where Carthage

42

OF Trees and Towns

had produced the congestion of a few com-
mercial centres, Rome spread out every-
where small flourishing and happy towns ; a
whole string of them along the coast in every
bay from the Hippos to Tangier. There is,
perhaps, not one of the little harbours
backed up against the spurs of the Atlas,
each in its bay, that has not a Roman market-
place beneath its own. Here, as throughout
the west, the civilisation of Rome was easy
and desired, for it was in her temper to be of
a conquering simplicity and in her chronicles
she openly confessed her sins. The same
unity which moulded Gaul was felt in Africa.
The Roman arch and brick and column, the
Roman road — all of one certain t3^pe —
are as plain throughout the Maghreb as a
thousand miles away in Treves or Rheims.

The desert was alien to Rome, as the
sea was. The old trade from the Soudan
which had been the staple of Leptis and
which Carthage had certainly maintained,

43

The Legionaries

drooped and perhaps disappeared. Roman
Africa turned to the Mediterranean and
lived upon the commerce of its further
shores. Along the edge of the Sahara a
string of posts was held. Biskra was Roman,
and El Kantara, and Gafsa. The doubt
indeed is rather where the Romans did not
penetrate, so tenacious were they in holding
the southern boundary of Europe, the wall
of the Atlas, against the wandering tribes of
the sand. There is a fine story of a French
commander who, having taken his column
with great efforts through a defile where
certainly men had never marched before, was
proud, and sent a party to chisel the number
of the regiment upon a smooth slab of rock
above them, but when the men had reached
it they saw in deep clear letters, cut long
before, "The II Ird Legion. The August. The
Victorious."

Of twenty startling resurrections of Rome
which a man sees in less than twenty days on

44

Verecunda

foot in any part of Algiers, consider this.
Beyond Lamboesis, the frontier town of
the Legionaries, with only a range of hills
between it and the Sahara, there was a little
town or village. It was quite small and a
long way off from the city. It was of no
importance ; we have no record of it.
Except that its name was Verecunda, we
know nothing about it. One of its citizens,
being grateful that he was born in his native
place, thought he would give the little town
or village a gate worthy of the love he bore
it, and he built an arch all inspired with the
weightiness of Rome.

The little town has gone. There is not
a single stone of it left. But as you come
round a grove of trees in a lonely part, under
the height of Aures, you have before you
this great thing, as though it were on the
Campagna or carefully railed round in some
very wealthy city.

It is all alone. The wind blows through it

45

The Great Arch

off the mountains. Every winter the frost
opens some new

httle crack, and
every generation
or so a stone
falls. But in
two thousand
years not so
much has been
ruined by ^'
time, but <r^
that the j
impression
of Rome re-
mains : its
height, its abso-
luteness, and its
strength. And this
example is but one
of very many that a

man might choose as he wandered up and
down the high steppes and through the gorges

of the hills.

46

W

The Berbers

As he so wanders, he is taken with a
strong desire to grasp the whole place at one
view as it stood just before the barbarians
came, and to see what the Vandals saw :
to look up the valley from the rock of
Cirta with the temples on the edge of either
precipice and to see the towns re-arise.
There are men who have felt this desire
in Italy, but in Africa it is a much
stronger desire, and since Africa is strange
and very empty, perhaps by watching
long enough at night that desire might be
fulfilled.

Rome not only governed, but also made,
Africa. The foundations on which the Magh-
reb is laid, and to which it must return, are
Roman ; the Berber race was no conscious
part of us. I have said that it did not
know itself until the Romans came, and
when they came the Berbers slipped into the
Roman unity more slowly and with more politi-
cal friction, (but with less rebellion and there-
fore less proof of ill-ease,) than did the Gauls.

47

The Berbers

There is no more symbolic picture in the
history of the Maghreb than the picture of
Scipio clothing in the Roman dress that
Massinissa, his ally^ the king of the nomads
who rode without stirrups or bridle.

The Berbers were not destined to preserve
their Roman dignity. Something barbaric in
them, something of the boundaries, of the
marches, planted in these men (though they
were, and still are, of our own kind) a genius
for revolt. Let it be noted that in Africa
every heresy arose. That Africa admitted
the Vandals by treason, and that even when
Africa accepted Islam, sect upon sect divided
its history. Africa has always stood to the
rest of the Empire as a sort of ne'er-do-weel :
a younger son perpetually asking for adven-
ture and rejecting discipline. To this the
Roman horror of the sea lent a peculiar aid.
Like Britain, Africa was cut off from the
mainland. Like Britain, Africa was destined

in the disruption of the Empire to lose the

48

The Arabs

Roman idiom and the traditions of orderly
life ; but with this difference, that Britain
was reconquered by the religion and the
manner of Europe within three generations of
its loss : Africa was finally invaded, not by
dull barbarians staring at the City and
humble before her name, but by a brilliant
cavalcade which galloped, driven forward by
high convictions. The Arabs came in the
seventh century, like a sort of youth contemp-
tuous of the declining head of Rome. Bar-
bary, then, I repeat, was swept into the Arabian
language and religion in one cavalry charge,
and that language and religion not only be-
came immediately the masters of its people,
but had twelve hundred years in which to
take root and make a soil.

For about five hundred years, from a
little after the birth of Our Lord to the close
of the sixth century, our culture had been
universal among the Berbers. In the last
three centuries the Faith was dominant.

49 D

The Arabs

But rebellion was in them, and when the
Arabs came the whole edifice suddenly
crumbled.

Asia, which had first sailed in by sea
and had been destroyed, or rather obliterated,
when Carthage fell, came in now from the
desert ; Asia was like an enemy who is
driven out of one vantage, and then, after a
breathing-space, makes entry by another.
But in such a struggle the periods of success
and failure are longer than those of sieges,
and even than the lives of kingdoms. The
Maghreb, our test of sovereignty, had ad-
mitted the Phoenician for some six or seven
hundred years. It had been thoroughly
welded into Rome for five hundred. The
Vandals came, and did no more than any
other wandering tribe : they stirred the final
anarchy a little ; they were at once absorbed.
But the tenacity by which Gaul, Britain,
Spain and the Rhine were to slough off the
memories of decay and to attain their own

The Arabs

civilisation again after the repose of the
Dark Ages— that tenacity was not in the nature
of Barbary.

In the seventh and eighth centuries,
when all the remainder of the west had
fallen, when Italy was already taxed and
half governed by a few Germans, when Gaul
and Spain had at their heads small bands
of mixed barbarian and Roman nobles,
and when everything seemed gone to ruin,
this southern shore of the Mediterranean
was overwhelmed and, what is more, per-
suaded.

There came riding upon it out of the
desert continual lines of horsemen whom
these horsemen of Numidia could mix with
and understand. The newcomers wore the
white wrapping of the south : all their ways
were southern ways, suited to the intensity of
the sun, and Barbary, or the main part of it,
was southern and burning. Their eyes were
very bright, and in their ornaments the half-
Si

The Arabs

tamed tribesmen recognised an old appetite
for splendour. For all the effect of Rome
perhaps one-third of the African provincials
were still nomadic when the Arabs appeared,
and that nomadic part was thickest towards
the desert from which the invasion came ;
the invaders themselves were nomads, and
even on the shore of the Maghreb, where
men had abandoned the nomadic habit, the
instinct of roving still lingered.

Islam, therefore, when it first came in,
tore up what Rome had planted as one tears
up a European shrub planted in the friable
soil of Africa.

The Bedawin, as they rode, bore with
them also a violent and simple creed. And
here, again, a metaphor drawn from the rare
vegetation of this province can alone define
the character of their arrival. Their Faith was
like some plant out of the solitudes ; it was
hard in surface ; it was simple in form ; it was
fitted rather to endure than to grow. It was

52

The Arabs

consonant with the waterless horizons and
the Winding rocks from which it had sprung.
Its victory was immediate. Before Charle-
magne was born the whole fabric of our effort
in Barbary, the traditions of St. Augustine
and of Scipio, had utterly disappeared.
No one from that time onwards could
build a Roman arch of stone or drive a
straight road from city to city or recite
so much as the permanent axioms of the
Roman Law.

Elsewhere, in Syria and in Asia and
in Spain, the Mohammedans failed to extir-
pate Christianity, and were able for some
centuries to enjoy the craftsmanship and
the sense of order which their European
subjects could lend them. It was only here,
in Africa, that their victory was complete.
Therefore it is only here, in Africa, that you
see what such a victory meant, and how,
when it was final, all power of creation dis-
appeared. The works which have rendered

53

The Arabs

Islam a sort of lure for Europe were works
that could not have been achieved save by
European hands.

The Roman towns did not decay ; they
were immediately abandoned. Gradually the
wells filled ; the forests were felled in bulk ;
none were replanted. Of the Olive Gardens,
the stone presses alone remain. One may
find them still beneath the sand, recalling
the fat of oil. But there, to-day, not a spear
of grass will grow, and the Sahara has
already crept in. The olives long ago were
cut down for waste, or for building or for
burning. There was not in any other
province of the empire so complete an
oblivion, nor is there any better example
of all that "scientific" history denies: for
it is an example of the cataclysmic — of
the complete and rapid changes b}^ which
history alone is explicable : of the folly of
accepting language as a test of origin : of
the might and rapidity of religion (which is

54

The Atlas

like a fire) : of its mastery over race (which
is Hke the mastery of fire over the vessels
it fuses or anneals) : of the hierarchic nature
of conquest : of the easy destruction of
more complex by simpler forms. . . .

If one is to understand this surprising
history of Barbary, and to know both what
the Romans did in it and what the Arabs
did, and to grasp what the reconquest has
done or is attempting to do, it is neces-
sary to examine the physical nature of this
land.

Along all its hundreds of miles, the Magh-
reb is determined by Mount Atlas, or rather,
the Maghreb is Atlas itself standing huge
between the Sahara and the sea. It is a
bulk of mountains so formed that one may
compare it to a city wall with a broad top
for fighting men to move on and a parapet
along both the inner and the outer edges.
The outer parapet, which is called " The

55

The Relief

Little Atlas/' runs along the Mediterranean
shore : the inner parapet, which is called
" The Great Atlas/' runs along the desert,
and is usually the higher of the two chains.
These two chains do not run quite parallel,
but converge towards Tunis and spread
apart towards the Atlantic ; the table-land
between them, which is called " The High
Plateaux," and is in some places three
thousand feet above the sea, broadens there-
fore from less than a hundred to well over
two hundred miles across ; but at either end
it somewhat changes its character, for at the
Tunis end it is too narrow to be a true
plateau and becomes a jumble of mountains
where the Greater and the Lesser Atlas
meet, while in Morocco it becomes too
broad to maintain its character and is diver-
sified by continual subsidiary ranges. But
in between these two extremities it is a true
table-land with isolated summits rising here
and there from it, and at their feet shallow

56

OF Barbary

and brackish lakes called Skotts, round
which are rims of marshy reeds and, in
summer, gleaming sheets of salt. For there
is no drainage away from the table-land to
the desert or to the sea, save where, here
and there, a torrent (such as the Chelif or
the Rummel) digs itself an erratic gorge
and escapes through the coast range to the
Mediterranean, These exceptions are very
rare and they do not disturb the general
plan of the country, which is everywhere con-
structed of the Atlas running in two ranges
that hold up between them the plateau
with its salt lakes and isolated groups of
hills.

57

The Table-land

If, therefore, one were to take a section
anywhere from north to south, from the
Mediterranean to the Sahara, one would
get some such figure as this :

where the perpendicular shading on the left
is the Mediterranean slope and drainage,
the horizontal shading on the right, the
desert slope, and where the Little Atlas is
marked A, the Great Atlas B (falling down
to E, the dunes of the Sahara), where at C
is one of the isolated hills of the table-land,
and at D and D a couple of those salt lakes
which add so strongly to the desolation of
these upland plains.

The High Plateaux, which, empty as they
are, make up the body of the Maghreb, are
not only a reality to the geographer : their
peculiar character is also apparent to every

58

■i';

The Table-land
traveller who
crosses them. • v /' ' v

The rise up to N"^ t

them from the ^^l/iT"^

Mediterranean, though *><: \ (!|W?

confused, is observable;
the fall from them to the
Sahara is violent, and, through its central
part, dramatic. It is not unusual for a
man who has traversed this table-land upon
more than one voyage to recall clefts in
the southern and the northern ranges so
placed that they were like windows through
-^ which one could look down upon the
U lower world.

^T. These clefts

UTi M ■ resemble each

''y1\ "*" other strangely.

From "^ ) .. ;^^ the one a man sees the

steps of ^ hmestone, the desert

cliffs, ^. touched rarely and more

rarely ^' by the green of palm-trees

59

The Table-land

and ending southward, glaring and arid and
sharp, against the extremity of the horizon.
From the other, he sees the woods of the
coast, dense and well watered, mixing with
the rocks about him, and right beyond the
valley the pleasant line of the sea. But
each of the views he carries in his mind
has this in common, that he has seen it
from a height, and looked down suddenly
from a mountain table-land upon a flat
below : to the north upon a level of waves
over which went the shadows of clouds : to
the south upon a level of sand stretching
under a small and awful sun.

If a man were to live in this land, the
High Plateaux would fill up the most of his
mind, as they take up by far the most of the
country itself in space. One is compelled
to move when one is upon them. There is
no resting-place : only, along the far edge,
before the fall into the desert begins, the
ruins of the Roman frontier towns. These

60

The Table-land

wastes hold the soul of Numidia. The horses
of Barbary are native to them. It is said
that these horses sicken on the seaboard —
certainly their race dies on the northern
shores of the Mediterranean unless it is
crossed with one of our coarser breeds — for
they were born to breathe this dry air and
to make rapid prints with their unshod
hoofs upon the powder of the plains and
the salt.

The table-land, then, is the heart of
the Maghreb, yet it has no name, not
even among the wandering Arabs.

These come up on to it in spring from
the hot desert below, driving slow files of proud
and foolish camels. They pasture flocks in
among the brushwood and by the rare
streams; then when the autumn descends
and the first cold appals them, before the
winter scurries across these flats, they turn
back and patiently go down the mountain roads
into the Sahara, leaving the Berbers to them-

6i

The Tell

selves again. For four months the plains

above are swept with snow, and a traveller

in that season, feeling the sharp and frozen

dust in his face before the gale, and seeing

far off bare cones of standing hills above salt

marshes, thinks himself rather in Idaho or

Nevada than here in Africa which Europe

thinks so warm.

That belt of coast upon which Atlas

descends is of a nature quite distinct from the

High Plateaux. The Americans can match

such sudden contrasts : we in Europe have

nothing of the kind. You come down from

salt water to fresh, from a cold (or from a

burning) to a genial air, and you enter as you

sink from the table-land a territory of great

luxuriance. It is called the Tell, and to seize

its character it is necessary to modify and to

develop somewhat one's idea of the mountain

chains. For though the Greater and the

Lesser Atlas run in those main lines which

appear in the little sketch upon page 58,

62

The Mountains

yet in detail each range, and especially the
range along the sea, is broken and complex,
and is made up of a number of separate
folds, sometimes parallel and sometimes over-
lapping, thus :

Moreover, the heights are irregular. There
are groups of high peaks and ridges against
the desert to the east in the Aures Mountains,
and to the west in those of Morocco, while
along the seaboard great bulges of mountain
rise in places from the Lower Atlas to a
height rivalling the inland range. For in-
stance, where an X is marked upon the
sketch map, there is an almost isolated mass
known as the Djurjura, very high, almost

The Berber Strongholds

as high as Aures, which stands up 150 miles
behind it above the Sahara. It was in these
groups of higher and more rugged hills along
the seaboard or the desert that the native
languages and perhaps the purity of the native
race took refuge both during the Roman
occupation and during the Arabian con-
quest. It is in these ravines that the ancient
tongue is spoken to this day. It is there that
the Berber type, though it is still every-
where what we ourselves are, has main-
tained itself least mixed with the foreigner :
it is even, perhaps, allied in these hills with
a people older than we or the Berber can be.
The fact that the Lesser Atlas thus faces
close upon the sea and falls upon it abruptly,
determines an abundant rain-fall upon the
Tell, and makes it fruitful. The fact that the
Lesser Atlas consists of folds overlapping each
other and running from north-east to south-
west has furnished a multitude of bays, each
lying between two spurs of the hills. Every

64

The Bays of the Tell

such bay has a harbour more or less impor-
tant, and that harbour is nearly always upon
the westerly side ; for the prevalent strong
wind, which is from the east, drives a current
with it, and this current scours out the bays,
clearing up and deepening the westerly shore,
but leaving the eastern shallow. Thus Bone,
Philippeville, Algiers, Calle, and Utica itself,
which was the oldest of all, are on the westerly
sides of such bays. Into each bay a mountain
torrent falls, or sometimes a larger stream,
and the long process of erosion has scoured
all the coast into a network of valleys, so
that, unless one has a clear view of the
scheme in one's mind, one is bewildered
and does not always know at what point
in the upward journey one passes from the
Tell to the High Plateaux, distinct as these
regions are.

Thus a simple plan of a portion of the
Tell is as given on the following page, where
the Une of crosses indicates the watershed

65 E

The Physical Constitution

between the Mediterranean and the inland
drainage of the High Plateaux.

But if one were to mark on this map a
stippled surface for contours under five hun-
dred feet, a hatched one for the same between
five and fifteen hundred, a black one up to

two thousand five hundred, and above that
leave the heights in white with little triangles
for the summits, one would get some such com-
plicated scheme as is shown on the opposite
page, where it will be seen that a high moun-
tain (at C) overlooks the shore far from the
watershed, and the scheme of valleys is
complex and might seem a labyrinth to a

66

Of the Tell

man on foot without a map. At A and B
are the ports of each bay, and near to each
at the mouth of either river a large plain
such as is characteristic of the heads of all
these inlets. Their earth is black, deep, and
fertile : inviting the plough. Such fields fed

Utica, Icosium and Hippo Regius and
Caesarea. They remained wild and aban-
doned for over a thousand years, but to-day
you may see miles of vineyards planted in
rows that run converging to the limits of the
plain, where, until this last generation, no
one had dug or pruned or gathered or pressed

67

The New Vineyard

since the Latin language was forgotten in these
lands. Indeed, it would be possible for a
fantastic man to see in this replanting of the
vine a symbol of the joy of Europe returning ;
for everywhere the people of the desert have
had a fear of wine, and their powerful legends
have affected us also in the north for a time.
But the vine is in Africa again. It will not
soon be uprooted.

Such plains, then, their rivers and their
adjacent seaport towns, make up the Tell,
in which the Romans nourished many millions
and in which the most part of the recon-
stituted province will at last build its homes.

By such a bay and entering such a harbour,
whoever comes to Africa reaches land.

It is perhaps at Bone, which stands to
half a mile where Hippo stood, that the best
introduction to Africa is offered. Here a
mountain of conspicuous height rules an
open roadstead full of shipping small and

68

The Bay of Hippo

large, and fenced round with houses for very
many miles. A far promontory on the
eastern side faces the western mountain, and
half protects the harbour from summer gales.
Below the mountain, the plain belonging
to this bay stretches in a large half-circle,

marked only here and there with buildings
but planted everywhere with olives, vines
and corn. In the midst of this great flat
stands up a little isolated hill, a sort of
acropolis, and from its summit, from a win-
dow of his monastery there, St. Augustine,
looking at that sea, wrote Uhi magnitudo,
ibi Veritas.

69

Hippo

The town is utterly gone. There are those
who argue that this or that was not done
as history relates, because of this or that
no vestige remains ; and if tradition tells
them that Rome built here or there, they
deny it, because they cannot find walls,
however much they dig (within the funds
their patrons allow them). These men are
common in the universities of Europe. They
are paid to be common. They should see
Hippo.

Here was a great town of the Empire.
It detained the host of Vandals, slaves and
nomads for a year. It was the seat of the
most famous bishopric of its day, and within
its walls, while the siege still endured,
St. Augustine died. It counted more than
Palermo or Genoa : almost as much as
Narbonne. It has completely disappeared.
There are not a few bricks scattered, nor a
line of Roman tiles built into a wall. There
is nothing. A farmer in his ploughing once

70

Calama

disturbed a few fragments of mosaic, but that
is all : they can make a better show at
Bignor in the Sussex weald, where an unlucky
company officer shivered out his time of
service with perhaps a hundred men.

In the heart of the Tell, behind the
mountains which hide the sea, yet right in
the storms of the sea, in its clouds and weather,
stands a little town which was called Calama
in the Roman time and is now, since the Arabs,
called Guelma.

It is the centre of that belt of hills. A
broad valley, one of the hundreds which
build up the complicated pattern of the
Mediterranean slope, lies before the plat-
form upon which the fortress rose. A
muddy river nourishes it, and all the plain
is covered with the new farms and vineyards
— beyond them the summits and the shoul-
ders that make a tumbled landscape every-
where along the northern shores of Africa
guard the place whichever way one turns.

71

Calama

From the end of every street one sees a
mountain.

If a man had but one day in which to
judge the nature of the province, he could
not do better than come to this town upon
some winter evening when it was already
dark, and wake next morning to see the
hurrying sky and large grey hills lifting up
into that sky all around and catching the
riot of its clouds. It is high and cold : there
is a spread of pasture in its fields and a sense
of Europe in the air. No device in the archi-
tecture indicates an excessive heat in summer
and even the trees are those of Italy or of
Provence. Its site is a survival from the
good time when the Empire packed this soil
with the cities of which so great a number
have disappeared : it is also a promise of what
the near future may produce, a new harvest
of settled and wealthy walls, for it is in the
refounding of such municipalities that the

tradition of Europe will work upon Africa

72

Calama

and not in barren adventure southward
towards a sky which is unendurable to our

which we can
and can hardly

is typical

race and under
never build
govern.

Guelma
in every
way. It
was Berber
before the
Romans
nothing re-
founders or
punic influ-
centuries
Of Rome so much en-
heavy walls and the
it were, the framework

In the citadel a great fragment larger
than anything else in the town runs right
across the soldiers' quarters, pierced with the
solid arches that once supported the palace

71

came, but
mains of its
of whatever
ence its first
may have felt,
dures that the
arches are, as
of the place.

The Permanence

of Calama. Only the woodwork has dis-
appeared. The stones which supported the
flooring still stand out unbroken, and the
whole wall, though it is not very high —
hardly higher than the big barracks around
it — remains in the mind, as though it had a
right to occupy one's memory of the Kasbah
by a sort of majesty which nothing that has
been built since its time has inherited. Here,
as throughout the Empire, the impression of
Rome is as indefinable as it is profound,
but one can connect some part of it at least
with the magnitude of the stones and the
ponderous simplicity of their courses, with the
strength that the half-circle and the straight
line convey, and with the double evidence of
extreme antiquity and extreme endurance ;
for there is something awful in the sight of
so many centuries visibly stamped upon the
stone, and able to evoke every effect of age
but not to compel decay.

This nameless character which is the

74

Of Rome

mark of the Empire, and carries, as it were,
a hint of resurrection in it, is as strong in
what has fallen as in what stands. A few
bricks built at random into a mud wall bear
the sign of Rome and proclaim her title : a
little bronze unearthed at random in the
rubbish heaps of the Rummel is a Roman
Victory : a few flag-stones lying broken upon
a deserted path in the woodlands is a Roman
Road : nor do any of these fragments suggest
the passing of an irrecoverable good, but
rather its continued victory. To see so many
witnesses small and great is not to remember
a past or a lost excellence, but to become
part of it and to be conscious of Rome all
about one to-day. It is a surety also for the
future to see such things.

There is a field where this perpetuity and
this escape from Time refresh the traveller
with peculiar power. It is a field of grass in
the uplands across which the wind blows with
vigour towards distant hills. Here a peasant

75

The Peasant's Wall

of the place (no one knows when, but long
ago) fenced in his land with Roman stones.
The decay of Islam had left him aimless, like
all his peers. He could not build or design.
He could not cut stone or mould brick. When
he was

compelled ^

to enclose
his pas-
ture, the
only ma-
terial he
could use
was the
work of

the old masters who had trained his fathers but
whom he had utterly forgotten or remembered
only in the vague name of " Roum." It was
long before the reconquest that he laboriously
raised that wall. Some shadow of Turkish
power still ruled him from Constantine. No
one yet had crossed the sea from Europe to

76

The Landscape of Antiquity

make good mortar or to saw in the quarries
again. It is with a Hvely appreciation that
one notes how all he did is perishing or has
perished. The poor binding he put in has
crumbled. The slabs slope here and there.
But the edges of those stones, which are
twenty times older than his effort, remain.
They will fall again and lie where he found
them ; but they and the power that cut them
are alike imperishable.

It has been said that the men of antiquity
had no regard for landscape, and that those
principal poems upon which all letters repose
betray an indifference to horizons and to
distant views. The objection is ill-found, for
even the poems let show through their ad-
mirable restraint the same passion which we
feel for hills, and especially for the hills of
home : they speak also of land-falls and of
returning exiles, and an Homeric man desired,
as he journeyed, to see far-off the smoke rising
from his own fields and after that to die. But

77

The Theatre of Calama

much stronger than anything their careful
verse can give us of this appetite for locahty
is the emplacement of their buildings.

Mr. March-Phillips has very well described
the spirit which built a certain temple into
the scenery of a Sicilian valley. Here (he
says), in a place now deserted, the white
pillars ornament a jutting tongue of land,
and are so placed that all the lines of the gorge
lead up to them, and that the shrine becomes
the centre of a picture, and, as it were, of a
composition. Of this antique consciousness of
terrestrial beauty all southern Europe is full,
and here in Guelma, upon an edge of the high
town, the site of the theatre gives evidence of
the same zeal.

The side of a hill was chosen, just where
the platform of the city breaks down sharply
upon the plain below. There, so that the
people and the slaves upon the steps could
have a worthy background for their plays,

the half-circle of the auditorium was cut out

78

The Theatre of Calama

like a quarry from the ground. Beyond the
actors, and giving a solemnity to the half-
religious concourse of the spectators, the
mountains of the Tell stood always up behind
the scene, and the height, not only of those
summits but of the steps above the plain,
enhanced the words that were presented. We
have to-day in Europe no such aids to the
senses. We have no such alliance of the air
and the clouds with our drama, nor even with
our patriotism — such as the modern world

has made it.
The last cen-
turies of the
Empire had
all these
things in
common :
great verse
inherited from an older time, good statuary,
plentiful fountains, one religion, and the open
sky. Therefore its memory has outlasted

79

The Greatness of

all intervening time, and it itself the Empire,
(though this truth is as yet but half-received,)
has re-arisen.

There is one great note in the story of our
race which the least learned man can at once
appreciate, if he travels with keen eyes
looking everywhere for antiquity, but which
the most learned in their books perpetually
ignore, and ignore more and more densely
as research develops. That note is the mag-
nitude of the first four centuries.

Everybody knows that the ancient world
ran down into the completed Roman Empire
as into a reservoir, and everybody knows
that the modern world has flowed outwards
from that reservoir by various channels.
Everybody knows that this formation of a
United Europe was hardly completed in the
first century, that it was at last conscious of
disintegration in the fifth. The first four
centuries are therefore present as dates in

80

The First Four Centuries

everybody's mind, yet the significance of the
dates is forgotten.

Historians have fallen into a barren con-
templation of the Roman decline, and their
readers with difficulty escape that attitude.
Save in some few novels, no writer has
attempted to stand in the shoes of the time
and to see it as must have seen it the barber
of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of
Sidonius' Palace. We know what was coming,
the men of the time knew it no more than
we can know the future. We take at its own
self-estimate that violent self-criticism which
accompanies vitality, and we are content to
see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.

The picture thus impressed upon us is
certainly false. There is hardly a town whose
physical history we can trace, that did not
expand, especially towards the close of that
time. There was hardly an industry or a
class (notably the officials) that had not by
an accumulation of experience grown to create

81 F

The Greatness of

upon a larger and a larger scale its peculiar
contribution to the State ; and far the larger
part of the stuff of our own lives was created,
or was preserved, by that period of unit/.

That our European rivers are embanked
and canalised, that we alone have roads, that
we alone build well and permanently, that we
alone in our art can almost attain reality, that
we alone can judge all that we do by ideas,
and that therefore we alone are not afraid of
change and can develop from within — in a
word, that we alone are Christians we derive
from that time.

Our theory of political justice was
partly formulated, partly handed on, by
those generations ; our whole scheme of law,
our conceptions of human dignity and of
right. Even in the details our structure of
society descends from that source : we govern,
or attempt to govern, by representation
because the monastic institutions of the end

of the Empire were under a necessity of

82

The First Four Centuries

adopting that device : we associate the horse
with arms and with nobihty because the last
of the Romans did so.

If a man will stand back in the time of
the Antonines and will look around him and
forward toward our own day, the consequence
of the first four centuries will at once appear.
He will see the unceasing expansion of the
paved imperial ways. He will conceive those
great Councils of the Church which would meet
indifferently in centres 1500 miles apart, in the
extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus : a
sort of moving city whose vast travel was not
even noticed nor called a feat. He will be
appalled by the vigour of the western mind
between Augustus and Julian when he finds
that it could comprehend and influence and
treat as one vast State what is even now,
after so many centuries of painful recon-
struction, a mosaic of separate provinces. He
will calculate with what rapidity and uni-
formity the orders of those emperors who

83

The Greatness of

seem to us the lessening despots of a fail-
ing state were given upon the banks of the
Euphrates, to be obeyed upon the Clyde.
He will then appreciate why the Rome which
Europe remembers, and upon which it is
still founded, was not the Rome of litera-
ture with its tiny forum and its narrow village
streets, but something gigantic like that
vision which Du Bellay had of a figure with
one foot upon the sunrise and its hands
overspreading ocean.

Indeed this great poet expresses the
thing more vividly by the sound of three
lines of his than even the most vivid history
could do.

" Telle que dans son char la B^rycynthienne
Couronnee de tours, et heureuse d'avoir
Enfante tant de dieux . . ."

This was the might and the permanence
from which we sprang.

To establish the character of the Empire
and its creative mission is the less easy from

84

The First Four Centuries

the prejudice that has so long existed against
the action of rehgion, and especially of that
reUgion which the Empire embraced as its
cataclysm approached. The acceptation of
the creed is associated in every mind with
the eclipse of knowledge and with a contempt
for the delights which every mind now seeks.
It is often thought the cause, always the
companion, of decay, and so far has this
sentiment proceeded that in reading tooks
upon Augustine or upon Athanasius one might
forget by what a sea and under what a sun-
light the vast revolution was effected.

It is true that when every European
element had mixed to form one pattern,
things local and well done disappeared. The
vague overwhelming and perhaps insoluble
problems which concern not a city but the
whole world, the discovery of human doom
and of the nature and destiny of the soul,
these occupied such minds as would in an
earlier lime have bent themselves to simpler

85

The Greatness of

and more feasible tasks than the search after
finality. It is true that plastic art, and to a
less extent letters, failed : for these fringes of
life whose perfection depends upon detail
demand for their occasional flowering small
and happy States full of fixed dogmas and of
certain usages. But though it lost the vis-
ible powers antiquity had known, the Empire
at its end, when it turned to the contem-
plation of eternity, broadened much more than
our moderns — who are enemies of its religious
theory — will admit. The business which
Rome undertook in her decline was so noble
and upon so great a scale that when it had suc-
ceeded, then, in spite of other invasions, the
continuity of Europe was saved. We ab-
sorbed the few barbarians of the fifth century,
we had even the vitality to hold out in the
terror and darkness of the ninth, and in the
twelfth we re-arose. It was the character
of the Western Empire during the first four
centuries, and notably its character towards

86

The First Four Centuries

their close, which prevented the sleep of the
Dark Ages from being a death. These first
four centuries cast the mould which still
constrains us ; they formed our final creed,
they fixed the routes of commerce and the
sites of cities, and perpetually in the smallest
trifles of topography you come across them
still : the boundary of Normandy, as we
know it to-day, was fixed by Diocletian. If
there can be said of Europe what cannot be
said of any other part of the world, that its
civilisation never grew sterile and never
disappeared, then we owe the power of saying
such a thing to that long evening of the
Mediterranean.

H: H: 4: H: H:

If this pre-eminence of Rome in the
process of her conversion is the lesson of all
travel it is especially the lesson of Africa ;
and nowhere is that lesson taught more clear
than in Guelma. Here also you may per-
ceive how it was that the particular cause

87

The Arabic Influence

which ruined the spirit of the Roman town
also saved its stones, and you may feel,
like an atmosphere, the lightness, the per-
meation, as it were, without pressure :■ — the
perpetual fluid influence which overflowed
the province upon the arrival of the Arabs.
So that the bone of Rome remain, caught in
a drift of ideas which, like fine desert sand,
could preserve them for ever.

For the Arab did in Calama what he did
throughout Barbary : he cast a spell. He
did not destroy with savagery, he rather ne-
glected all that he could afford to neglect.
Here also he cut down timber, but he did
not replant. Here also he let the water-pipes
of the Romans run dry. Here also the Arab,
who apparently achieved nothing material,
imposed a command more powerful than the
compulsion of any government or the fear of
any conqueror : he sowed broadcast his religion
and his language ; his harvest grew at once ;
first it hid and at last it stifled the religion

The Arabic Influence

and the language he had found. The speech,
and the faith which renders that speech sacred,
transformed the soul of Barbary : they
oppose between them a barrier to the recon-
quest more formidable by far than were the
steppes and the nomads to the first advance of '
Rome. Of this impalpable veil which is
spread between the native population and the
new settlers the traveller is more readily
aware in the little cities of the hills than in
the larger towns of the coast. The external
change of the last generation is apparent :
the houses about him are European houses ;
the roads might be roads in France or
Northern Italy. The general aspect of Guelma
confirms that impression of modernity, nor
is there much save the low loop-holed walls
which surround the town, to remind one of
Africa; but from the midst of its roofs rises
the evidence of that religion which still holds
and will continue to hold all its people. The
only building upon which the efforts of an

89

The Arabic Influence

indolent creed have fastened is the mosque,
and the minaret stands alone, conspicuous
and central over all the European
attempt, and mocks us.

Far off, where the walls
and the barracks are confused
into a general band of white,
and no outline is salient enough
to distinguish the modern from
the ancient work of the place,
this wholly Mohammedan shaft
of stone marks the place for
Mohammedan. It is an enduring
challenge.

There is a triumph
of influence which all of
us have known and against
which many of us have
struggled. It is certainly
not a force which one
can resist, still less is it effected by (though
it often accompanies) the success of armies.

90

<'Vt^!S'?^'iitVi5t'",ir

/\ /'N <

The Arabic Influence

It is the pressure and at last the conquest
of ideas when they have this three-fold
power : first, that they are novel and attack
those parts of the mind still sensitive ;
secondly, that they are expounded with con-
viction (conviction necessary to the convey-
ance of doctrine) ; and, thirdly, that they
form a system and are final. Such was the
triumph of the Arab.

Our jaded day, which must for ever be
taking some drug or tickling itself with unac-
customed emotion, has pretended to discover
in Islam, as it has pretended to discover in
twenty other alien things, the plan of happi-
ness ; and a stupid northern admiration for
whatever has excited the wonder or the
curiosity of the traveller has made Moham-
medism, as it has made Buddhism and God
knows what other inferiorities or aberrations
of human philosophy, the talk of drawing-
rooms and the satisfaction of lethargic men.
It is not in this spirit that a worthy tribute

91

The Arabic Invasion

can be paid to the enormous invasion of the
seventh century.

That invasion as a whole has failed.
Christendom, for ever criticised, (for it is in its
own nature to criticise itself,) has emerged ;
but if one would comprehend how sharp was
the issue, one should read again all that was
written between Charlemagne and the death
of St. Louis. In the Song of Roland, in the
"Gesta Francorum," in Joinville, this new
attack of Asia is present — formidable, and
greater than ourselves ; something which we
hardly dared to conquer, which we thought
we could not conquer, which the greatest of
us thought he had failed in conquering. Islam
was far more learned than we were, it was
better equipped in arms and nevertheless more
civic and more tolerant. When the last efforts
of the crusades dragged back to Europe an evil
memory of defeat, there was perhaps no doubt
in those who despaired, still less in those who

secretly delighted that such fantasies were

92

Its Continued Influence

ended — there was no doubt, I say, in their
minds that the full re-establishment of our
civilisation was impossible, and that the two
rivals were destined to stand for ever one
against the other : the invader checked and
the invaded prudent ; for, throughout the
struggle we had always looked upon our rivals
at least as equals and usually as superiors.

It is in the most subtle expressions that
the quarrel between the two philosophies
appears. Continually Islam presses upon us
without our knowing it. It made the Albi-
genses, it is raising here and there throughout
European literature at this moment notes of
determinism, just as that other influence
from the Further East is raising notes of
cruelty or of despair.

There is one point in which the contact
between these master-enemies and ourselves
is best apparent. They gave us the Gothic,
and yet under our hands the Gothic became
the most essentially European of all European

93

The Gothic

things. Con-
these two
one Arabian
founded in
yet the vigour
Hsation was strong,
is not in stone but
to work stone they
older civiUsation
own. But see how
of, or rather iden-
ogive .

..>«-S.V.VA^V V

//

we re-
secting
of the
own) to
And how is
that no
built these
wind ows
so much
West, and by just

94

s i d e r

^r7WvV^\r<f'' tiers of
building
Africa, while
of that civi-
True, the work
in plaster, for
needed an
than their
it is the origin
tical with, our
By what is it that
cognise these inter-
segments (which are
perfect 60° like our
be something foreign ?
it that we know
Christian could have
things ? Venice has
like these : by just
she is not of the
that innoculation

The Gothic

perhaps she perished. The ecstasy of height,
the self-development of form into further
form, the grotesque, the sublime and the
enthusiastic — all these things the Arab arch
lacks as utterly as did the Arab spirit ; yet
the form is theirs and we obtained it from
them. In this similarity and in these differ-
ences are contained and presented visibly the
whole story of our contact with them and
of our antagonism.

In the presence of the doom or message
which the Arabians communicated to our
race in Africa, one is compelled to something
of the awe with which one would regard a
tomb from which great miracles proceeded,
or a dead hero who, though dead, might not
be disturbed. The thing we have to combat,
or which we refrain and dread from combat-
ing, is not tangible, and is the more difficult
to remove. It has sunk into the Atlas
and into the desert, it has filled the mind
of every man from the Soudan which it

95

The Touaregs

controls up northwards to Atlas and through-
out this land.

Roaming in the Sahara are bands of men
famous for their courage and their isolation.
They are called the Touaregs. They are of
the same race and the same language as those
original Berbers who yet maintain themselves
apart in the heights of Aures or of the Djurd-
jura. They are the enemies of all outside
their tribes, especially of the Arab merchants,
upon whose caravans they live by pillage.
Yet even these Islam has thoroughly pos-
sessed and would seem to have conquered
for ever. Their language has escaped ; their
tiny literature (for they have letters of their
own, and their alphabet is indigenous) has
survived every external influence, but even
there the God of the Mohammedans has
appeared.

One taken captive some years since wrote
back from Europe to his tribe in his own stiff
characters a very charming letter in which he

96

The Touaregs

ended by recommending himself to the young
women of his home, for he himself was a
fighter, courteous, and in his thirtieth year.
But when he had written " Salute the Little
Queens from me," he was careful to add an
invocation to Allah. And if in their long
forays it is necessary to bury hastily some
companion who has fallen in the retreat, his
shallow grave in the sand is carefully designed
according to the custom of religion. They
leave him upon his right side in an attitude
which they hold as sacred, his face turned
to the east and towards Mecca. In this
posture he awaits the Great Day.

Against this vast permanent and rooted
influence we have nothing to offer. Our
designs of material benefit or of positive
enlightenment are to the presence of this
common creed as is some human machine
to the sea. We can pass through it,
but we cannot occupy it. It spreads out
before our advance, it closes up behind.

97 G

The Lack of

Nor will our work be accomplished until we
have recovered, perhaps through disasters
suffered in our European homes, the full
tradition of our philosophy and a faith which
shall permeate all our actions as completely
as does this faith of theirs.

That no religion brought by us stands
active against their own is an apparent weak-
ness in the reconquest, but that consequence
of the long indifference through which Europe
has passed is not the only impediment it has
produced. The dissolution of the principal
bond between Europeans — the bond of their
traditional ritual and confession — has also
prevented the occupation of Africa from
being, as it should have been, a united and
therefore an orderly campaign of the West
to recover its own.

Had not our religion suffered the violent
schisms which are now so slowly healing, and
had not our general life resolved itself for a
time into a blind race between the various

98

AN Opposing Faith

provinces of Europe, the reconquest of Bar-
bary would have fallen naturally to the
nations which regard each its own section of
the opposing coast ; as in the reconquest of
Spain the Asturias advanced upon Leon, the
Galicians upon Portugal, and Old Castille upon
the southern province to which it extended
its own name. Then Italy would have con-
cerned itself with Tunis — with Ifrigya, that
is — and with the rare fringe of the Tripolitan
and its shallow harbours. The French would
have occupied Numidia. The Spaniards would
have swept on to re-Christianise the last
province of the west from Oran to the At-
lantic, and so have completed the task which
they let drop after the march upon Granada.
Such should have been the natural end of
mediaeval progress, and that reconstruction of
the Empire (which was the nebulous but
constant goal towards which the Middle Ages
moved) would have been accomplished. But
the most sudden and the most inexpHcable of

9Q

Cause of Isolated

our revolutions came in and broke the
scheme. The Middle Ages died without a
warning. A curious passion for metaphysics
seized upon certain districts of the north,
which in their exaltation attempted to live
alone : the south, in resisting the disruption
of Europe, exhausted its energies ; and mean-
while the temptation to exploit the Americas
and the Indies drained the Mediterranean of
adventurers and of navies. Islam in its leth-
argy acquired new vigour from its latest
converts, and the Turks, with none but the
Venetians to oppose them, tore away from us
the whole of the Levant and rode up the
Danube to insult the centre of the continent.
The European system flew apart, and its
various units moved along separate paths with
various careers of hesitation or of fever. It
was not until the Revolution and the recon-
stitution of sane government among us that
the common scheme of the west could re-
appear.

French Action

On this account — on account of the vast
disturbance which accompanied the Reforma-
tion and the Renaissance — Europe halted for
three centuries. When at last a force landed
upon the southern shore of the Mediterranean,
it was a force which happened to be despatched
by the French.

The vices and the energy of this people
are well known. They are perpetually critical
of their own authorities, and perpetually
lamenting the decline of their honour. There
is no difficulty they will not . urmount. They
have crossed all deserts and have perfected
every art. Their victories in the field would
seem legendary were they not attested ; their
audacity, whether in civil war or in foreign
adventure, has permanently astonished their
neighbours to the south, the east and the
north. They are the most general in framing
a policy and the most actual in pursuing
it. Their incredible achievements have
always the appearance of accidents. They

lOI

The French

are tenacious of the memory of defeats rather
than of victories. They change more rapidly
and with less reverence than any other men
the external expression of their tireless effort,
yet, more than any other men, they preserve
— in spite of themselves — an original and
unchanging spirit. Their boundaries are con-
tinually the same. They are acute and vivid
in matters of reason, careless in those of
judgment. A coward and a statesman are
equally rare among them, yet their achieve-
ments are the result of prudence and their
history is marked by a succession of silent
and calculating politicians. Alone of Euro-
pean peoples the Gauls have, by a sort of
habit, indulged in huge raids which seemed
but an expense of military passion to no
purpose. They alone could have poured out
in that tide of the third century before our
era to swamp Lombardy, to wreck Delphi,
and to colonise Asia. They alone could have
conceived the crusades : they alone the

102

The French

revolutionary wars. It is remarkable that
in all such eruptions they alone fought east-
ward, marching from camp into the early
light ; they alone were content to return with
little spoil and with no addition of provinces,
to write some epic of their wars.

It is evident that such a people would
produce in Africa, not a European and a
general, but a Gallic and a particular effect.
They boast themselves in everything the con-
tinuators of the Romans. They do, indeed,'
inherit the Roman passion for equality, and
they, like the Romans, have tenaciously fought
their way to equality by an effort spread
over many hundred years. They are Roman
in their careful building, in their strict roads,
in their small stature, in their heavy chests,
in their clarity of language, in their adoration
of office and of symbol, in their lightning
marches : the heavy lading of their troops,
their special pedantry, their disgust at vague-
ness, their ambition and their honour are

103

The French

Roman. But they are not Roman in per-
manent stability of detail. The Romans
spread an odour of religion round the smallest
functions of the State : of the French you
can say no more than that any French thing
you see to-day may be gone to-morrow, and
that only France remains. They are not
Roman in the determination never to retreat,
nor are they Roman in the worship of silence.
The French can express the majesty of the
Empire in art : they cannot act it in their
daily life — for this inheritance of Rome the
Spaniards are better suited. As for the
Roman conception of a fatal expansion the
Russians exceed them, and for the Roman
ease and aptitude the Italians.

Had, then, the reconquest of Barbary
fallen naturally to the three sisters — to Spain,
to Italy, and to France, the long attempt
of Europe might have reached its end. The
Spaniard would have crushed and dominated
in Morocco where the Mohammedan was most

104

The French

strongly entrenched ; the ItaHan, with his
subtle admixture, would have kneaded Tunis
and the eastern march into a firm barrier ;
the French would have developed their active
commerce upon the many small towns of the
Central Tell, would have pierced, as they are
fitted to pierce, the high Central Plateaux
with admirable roads, and would have garri-
soned, as their taste for a risk well fits them to
garrison, the outposts of the Central Atlas
against the desert. Then the task would be
over, and Europe would be resettled within its
original boundaries.

On their long route marches, on the
marches of their manoeuvres and their wars,
the French, along their roads which are direct
and august, (and at evening, when one is
weary, sombre,) seek a place of reunion and
of repose : upon this the corps converges, and
there at last a man may he a long night under
shelter and content to sleep : a town lies

105

The March

before the pioneers and is their goal. It
stands^ tiny with spires, above the horizon of
their hedgeless plains, and as they go they sing
of the halt, or, for long spaces, are silent, bent
trudging under the pack: for they abhor
parade. Very often they do not reach their
goal. They then lie out in bivouac under the
sky and light very many fires, five to a
company or more, and sleep out unsatisfied.
Such a strain and such an attempt : such a
march, such a disappointment, and such a
goal are the symbols of their history ; for
they are perpetually seeking, under arms, a
Europe that shall endure. In this search they
must continue here in Africa, as they continue
in their own country, that march of theirs
which sees the city ever before it and yet
cannot come near to salute the guard at the
gates and to enter in. It is their business to
re-create the Empire in this province of Africa.
It may be that here also they will come to no
completion ; but if they fail, Europe will fail

io6

The French Genius

with them, and it will be a sign that our
tradition has ended.

They have done the Latin thing. First
they have designed, then organised, then
built, then ploughed, and their wealth has
come last. The mind is present to excess in
the stamp they have laid upon Africa. Their
utter regularity and the sense of will envelop
the whole province ; and their genius, in-
flexible and yet alert, alert and yet mono-
tonous, is to be seen everywhere in similar
roads, similar bridges of careful and even
ornamented stone, similar barracks and loop-
holed walls.

There is a perspective upon the High Pla-
teaux which though it is exceptional is typical
of their spirit. It is on the salt plain just be-
fore the gate of the desert is reached and the
fall on to the desert begun. Here the flat and
unfruitful level glares white and red : it is of
little use to men or none. Some few adven-
turers, like their peers in the Rockies, have

107

The Straight Railway

attempted to enclose a patch or two of ground,
but the whole landscape is parched and dead.
Through this, right on like a ges-

ture of command, hke the dart of

a spear, goes the rail, urg

ing to-

^ .A

wards the Sahara, as though the Sahara
were not a boundary but a goal. The odd,
single hills, as high as the Wrekin or higher,
upon which not even the goats can live,
look down upon the straight line thus traced :
these hills and the track beneath them afford
a stupendous contrast. Nowhere is the de-
termination of man more defiant against the
sullen refusal of the earth.

There is another effort of the French

1 08

The French Afforestation

which may be watched with more anxiety
and more comprehension by northern men
than their admirable roads or their railways
or their wires above the sand, and that is
their afforestation.

It is a debate which will not be decided
(for the material of full decision is lacking)
whether, since the Romans crowded their
millions into this Africa, the rainfall has or
has not changed. It is certain that they
husbanded water upon every side and built
great barricades to hold the streams ; yet
it is certain, also, that their cities stood where
no such great groups of men could live to-day.
There are those who believe that under Atlas,
towards the desert, a shallow sea spread
westward from the Mediterranean and from
Syrtis : there are others who believe that the
dry water-courses of the Sahara were recently
alive with streams, and that the tombs and
inscriptions of the waste places, now half
buried in the sand, prove a great lake upon

109

The French Afforestation

whose shores a whole province could cultivate
and live. Both hypotheses are doubtful for
this reason — that no good legend preserves
the record. Changes far less momentous
have left whole cycles of ballads and stories
behind them. The Sahara has been the
Sahara since men have sung or spoken of it.
Moreover, the Romans did certainly push out,
as the French have done, towards certain
limits, beyond which no effort was worth the
while of armies. They felt a boundary to
the south. They could bear the summer of
Biskra, but not that of Touggourt : their posts
upon the edge of the desert were ultimate
posts as are the European garrisons to-day.

But in one thing the sense of change is j us-
tified, and that is the fall of the woods. Here
Islam worked itself out fully : its ignorance
of consequence, its absolute and insufficient
assertion, its lack of harmony with the process
and modulation of time, its Arabian origin,
are all apparent in the destruction of trees.

The French Afforestation

If the rainfall is as abundant as ever, it is not
held, for the roots of trees are lacking, and if
it be true that trees in summer bring rain of
themselves by their leaves, then that benefit
is also gone. There are many deep channels,
called secchias, traversing the soft dust of the
uplands, with no trace of bridges where the
Roman roads cross them : they are new.
They are carved by the sudden spates that
follow the cloudbursts in the hills. Here,
perhaps, in the Roman time were regular and
even streams, and perhaps, upon their banks,
where now are stretches of ugly earth quite
bare, the legionaries saw meadows. At any
rate, the trees have gone.

Up in the higher hills, in Aures and the
Djurjura, upon the flanks of the mountains
where the Berbers remain unconquered, and
where the melting of the snows give a copious
moisture, forests still remain. They are com-
monly of great cedars as dark as the pine woods
of the Vosges or the noble chesnut groves by

The French Afforestation

which the Alps lead a man down into Italy.
But these forests are rare and isolated as the
aboriginal languages and tribes which haunt

them. You
may camp
under the deep
boughs within a
Batna and then
ward and east-
days and days
before you come
woods and their
their good floor of
needles in the heights from which you see
again the welcome of the Mediterranean.

This lack of trees the French very labo-

march of
go north-
ward for
of walking
again to the
scent and

Story of the Determinist

riously attempt to correct. Their chief ob-
stacle is the nature of that reHgion which is
also the hard barrier raised against every
other European thing which may attempt
to influence Africa to-day.

There was a new grove planted some ten
years since in a chosen place. It was sur-
rounded with a wall, and the little trees
were chosen delicately and bought at a great
price, and planted by men particularly skilled.
Also, there was an edict posted up in those
wilds (it was within fifty miles of the desert,
just on the hither side of Atlas) saying that
a grove had been planted in such and such
a place and that no one was to hurt the
trees, under dreadful penalties. The French
also, as is the laudable custom of Re-
publicans, gave a reason for what they did,
pointing out that trees had such and
such an effect on climate — the whole in
plain clear terms and printed in the Arabic

script.

113 H

Story of the Determinist

There was, however, a Mohammedan
who, on reading this, immediately saw in it
an advertisement of wealth and pasture.
He drove his goats for nearly fifteen miles,
camped outside the wall, and next day lifted
each animal carefully one by one into the
enclosure that they might browse upon the
tender shoots of the young trees. " Better,"
he thought, *' that my goats should fatten
than that the mad Christians should enjoy
this tree-fad of theirs which is of no advan-
tage to God or man."

When his last goat was over two rangers
came, and, in extreme anger, brought him
before the magistrate, where he was asked
what reason he could give for the wrong thing
he had done. He answered, "R'aho, it was
the will of God. Mektoub, it was written " —
or words to that effect.

^F "I* ^ *»* •**

The platform of the Rock of Cirta is the
place from which the effort of the French

114

CiRTA OR CONSTANTINE

over all this
land can best
be judged,
for it is

the centre
round
which
nature and his-
tory have
grouped the four
changes of Bar-
bary.
The rock is hke those
headlands which jut out from in-
land ranges and dominate deep
harbours ; it is as bold as are such
capes, and is united, as they
are, with the mass of land behind it by a
neck of even surface — the only passage by
which the rock itself can be approached.
On every side but this, very sharp slopes of

"5

CONSTANTINE

grass, broken by precipices, plunge down in a
mountainous way to the valleys, and at the
foot of the most sheer of these there tumbles
noisily in a profound gorge the torrent
called Rummel, that is, " The Tawny,"
for it is as yellow as a lion or as sea-sand.

The trench is so deep and dark that one
may stand above it towards evening and
hear the noise of the water and yet see no
gleam of light reflected from it, it runs so far
below. It is this stream which has made on
the Rock of Cirta (though it is out of the
true Tell and far into the Tableland) a habit-
able fortress and a town; the town called
Constantine.

Such sites are very rare. Luxemburg is
one, a stronghold cut off by similar precipitous
valleys. Jerusalem is another. Wherever they
are found the origin of their fortress goes back
beyond the beginning of history, they are tribal,
and their record is principally of war. So it is
with Cirta. The legends of the nomads say

ii6

CONSTANTINE

that they descended from some enormous
dusky figure, a God of the Atlas and of Spain
— a giant God marching along the shores of the
ocean followed perpetually by armies. Even
this first of African names was mixed up with
Cirta, for the title of the rock was that of his
loves, and the name Cirta given it by these
horsemen of Numidia was the name of their
universal mother. A man can be certain,
as he walks along the edges of the place to-day
and looks down into the gulfs below it, that
men have so moved here amid buildings and in
a fixed town with altars and a name ever since
first they knew how to mortar stones together
and to obey laws. The close pack of houses
standing thus apart upon a peak has in it,
therefore, something consistently sacred.
Permanence and continuity are to be dis-
covered here only among the cities of Africa ;
and its landscape and character of themselves
impress the traveller with a certitude that here
will be planted on into time the capital of

117

CONSTANTINE

the native blood : too far removed from the
sea for colonisation or piracy / to destroy

it : too
well cut
off by
those
trenches
of defence

to be

sackedand

overrun ;

peopled

well wa-

decay.

town has

every conquest,

conqueror has

to have overcome

the hundreds of feet

The boast is mani-

absurd, though the temptation to

it was irresistible. When Cirta has

too
and
tered to

The '^

been taken in
and every
boasted himself
the walls of rock,
of sheer climbing,
festly
make

118

CONSTANTINE

been stormed only one gate admitted the
invaders, and that was the isthmus which
leads from the platform of the summit to
the tableland beyond. It was here that
Massinissa and here that the Romans
entered. By this entry came the French
soldiers, and the market which stands
there is called to-day " The Place of the
Breach."

There is a place in Constantine where the
full history of the town is best felt, and that
is in the new Town Hall, which stands upon
the edge of the rock upon the side furthest
from the river and looks at the storms
blowing over the uplands from Atlas and
driving low clouds right at the crest of the
walls. In this building are preserved (in no
great number) the antiquities of the place and
its neighbourhood. Here is a little silver
victory which once fluttered, it is thought,
in the hand of that great statue which adorned
the Capitol, and here are long rows of tombs

"9

The Inscriptions

from the beginning of the ItaHan influence
till the time of the martyrs : you see carved
upon them the slow change of the mind until
the last of the pagans boast of such virtues
and have already that sort of content which
the acceptation of the creed was to bequeath
to succeeding time. This record of the
epitaphs, though brief, is perfect ; you watch
at work in them the spirit that made St.
Cyprian transforming the African soil;
but their chief interest is in this, that
they are, as it were, a rediscovery of our-
selves. You dig through centuries of alien
rubbish overlying the Roman dead, and,
when you have dug deeply enough you come
suddenly upon Europe. For twelve hundred
years an idiom quite unfamihar to us has
alone been spoken here : beneath it you
find the august and reasonable Latin, and
as you read you feel about you the air of
home. For all those generations the manifold
aspect of the divine was forgotten : there were

The Inscriptions

no shrines nor priests to rear them. Then,
deep down, you discover a tablet upon a
tomb, and, reading it, you find it was carved
in memory of a priestess of Isis who was so
gracious and who so served the divinities of
the woods that when she died ingemuerunt
Dryades : twice I read those dehcate words,
dehcately chiselled in hard stone, and I saw
her going in black, with her head bent, through
groves. A trace of colouring remains upon
the lettering of the verse and a powerful
affection lingers in it, so that the past is
preserved. Islam destroyed with fanaticism
the figures of animals and of men : here in
these European carvings they are every-
where. The barbarian creed conceived or
implanted a barbaric fear of vines : here you
see Bacchus, young, on the corner of a frieze,
and gentle old Silenus carried heavily along.

if Hf if * ^

If it is from the Rock of Cirta, from Con-
stantine, that the recovery of the province

C^SAREA OR ChERCHEL

and its re-entry into Europe is best perceived
— for there stands the unchanging centre of
Africa, and there can all the threads of her
destiny be grasped — yet there is another
place far westward and down upon the shore,
where the wound that Europe suffered by the
Mohammedan invasion is more marked and
long eclipse of our race more apparent. It
is the Bay of Caesarea.

Constantine is so necessary to Africa
that its very name (and it is alone in this
among all the cities) has been preserved.
Caesarea has lost its name and its dignity too.
The Barbarians have come to call her " Cher-
chel " : as for her rank, it has been forgotten
altogether ; yet this port was for a hundred
years peculiar among all others in the Medi-
terranean— it was more remote, more splendid,
and more new. The accident which created
it lent a great story to its dynasty, and its
situation here, along the steeper shores that
lead on to the Straits and to the outer ocean,

122

Cherchel

lent some western mystery to it and some
appeal.

Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, was
famous throughout the Mediterranean for her
beauty. The last of her lovers — it is well
known — was Anthony the Triumvir, who had
desired (until he saw her) to inherit from Caesar
and to rule the whole world. This ambition
he abandoned after one battle, lost, it is said,
through her folly ; and soon after that defeat
they chose to die. But a fruit of their loves,
and a picture, perhaps, of his courage and of
her magnificence, survived in a daughter
whom her mother had dedicated to the Moon
and had called Selene. This child was married
out into Barbary, to the king of the nomads,
and here, in Cherchel, she held with her
husband for many years a court which gathered
round it the handicraft of Corinth, the letters
of Athens, and some reflected splendour
from the town of Rome.

He was of those horsemen who had now
123

Cherchel

for two centuries served Carthage as mer-
cenaries or Rome as allies. To the cities of
the sea coast, which were Italian or Asiatic in
blood, these riders of the uplands had been
outer men. They appeared barbaric to the
end, and, at the very end, it was their blood,
perhaps, that rebelled against the tradition
of order and that joined first the Vandal and
then the Arab. The king was dark and a
barbarian. This wife who was sent to him
inherited the broad forehead of Rome and
the silence of Egypt, and was also an heiress to
the generals of Alexander. There met in her,
therefore, all those high sources from whose
unison Christendom has proceeded. She
came west to a new land that did not know
cut stone and hardly roads : in a little time
she had built a city.

By some economic power which no one
has explained, but which may be compared
to the wealth of our smaller independent
States to-day and their merchants, to Antwerp

124

Cherchel

or to The Hague, this city of Mauretania rose
to be a marvel. The porticos stretched along
that rise of land, and a mile of new work,
columns and pedestalled statues and arcades,
looked down from the slope and saw, making
for the shore, perpetual sails from the
eastward. Great libraries dignified the city :
a complete security and a humane con-
sideration for the arts continually increased
its glory. The passion for scholarship, which
was at that time excessive, may have touched
the palace here with something of the ridicu-
lous. The king wrote, dictated, or com-
manded a whole shelf of books and was eager
for the pride of authorship. But no other
note of indignity entered their State, and all
around them, looking out to sea, was a resur-
rection of Greece.

This queen and her husband lived on
into old age thus, untroubled in their isolation
and their content, and destined (as they
thought) to leave a dynasty which even the

125

Cherchel

domination of Rome would protect and
spare.

Nothing is left. Rome seized their town
at last. Their descendants perished. All
Mauretania was compelled to follow the com-
mon line of unity. For four hundred years it
has no history save that under the Roman
order it endured and increased. The Vandals
passed it by : it might still stand had there
not fallen upon it the Mohammedan invasion
which everywhere destroyed, or rather aban-
doned, a Roman endeavour. The neglect
which was native to the Arab, the sharp
breach which he made in tradition, ended
Caesarea. To-day, a little market town, a
tenth of the old capital, barrenly preserves a
memory of those two thousand years. A few
fragments which the plough recovers or which
the builders have spared are gathered in one
place : the rest is parched fields and trees.

One conspicuous monument survives to

emphasise the retreat of the empire. It is

126

The Aqueduct

something the Arab could not waste because it

did not
He within
the circuit
of the
walls : its
great
stones
were too
remote
from his
buildings
rem ove d,
mass too
ing to be
mined. It

t o
and

b e

its
threaten-
under-
was the
Aqueduct,
the most
stands, and
aspect of
awful in

for
still
ries an
endurance which is the more
that nothing else of the city
127

The Aqueduct

has endured. It spans a lonely valley in
which the bay and the old harbour are
forgotten, and it is as enormous as the name
of Rome.

It is more like a wall for height and
completeness than are any of the huge Roman
arches I know. Its height is such that it
catches the mind more strongly than does
the Pont du Gard, and its completeness such
that it arrests the eye more than do the
long trails of arches that stretch like rays
across the Campagna. It appalls one because
it is quite alone, and because the multitude
that gave it a meaning has disappeared. One
could wish to have seen this thing before the
French came, when the brushwood of the
valley was quite deserted and when one might
have thought it fixed for ever in an intan-
gible isolation which no European would
come again to reoccupy and to disturb.

Even to-day one may climb to the fur-
ther, inland, side and look down the perspective

128

The Aqueduct

of its arches with some illusion of loneliness,
and live for an hour in the fifteen centuries
of its abandonment. Its height, its fineness,
and the ruin of its use ^ are so best
seen, and its long line
pointing on to a city
remembers
fountains. It - -■"
is the cease-
less refrain
of Africa.
Italy, Gaul, and Spain
like these, but these
right against a life
always been vigorous
is especially renewed :
one province of Africa

of purpose,
that no longer
baths or

have ruins
rums are
which has
and to-day
only in this
do you find
Rome arrested, as it were- its spirit caught
away and its body turned into stone.

4: 4c % 4: *

There was last to be seen, before I could
leave this province, the desert and those

i2g I

The Beginning of the

dead towns which stand along the hither
fringe of it : the deserted homes of the
Romans, and chief among them Timgad.

The Atlas, I had heard, is there at its
highest, and the knot of mountains into which
it rises is called the Aures. Upon its southern
side it fell steeply (I was told) upon the
Sahara, and its northern supported, on the
last of the High Table-land, those ruined
cities. Here the frontier legionaries had been
posted, and here the Arab invasion had so
wasted the forests and dried up the run of
water that the towns had died at once. This
Timgad in particular is famous for its per-
fection and for the complete survival of its
form, but especially for this, that you walk
along paved streets and between standing
columns and look, from the seats of a theatre,
towards a great arch or gate not yet fallen,
and yet never hear the voice of a living
man.

I took my way to this place, the last
130

Journey to the Desert

of the towns I desired to see — the tombstone,
as it were, of the empire, the symbol or
promise of the reconquest. I went partly by
day and partly by night, partly by the rail-
road and partly on foot across the High
Plateau southward till I should come to it.
Upon my way I met many men who should,
perhaps, have no part in such a little historical
essay as is this, but for fear I should altogether
forget them I will write them down.

The first was an ill-dressed fellow, young,
and with very sad eyes such as men keep
sometimes in early life but lose at last as they
learn in time to prey upon others. He had
been unfortunate. We went along together
across a plain peculiarly lonely, and towards
a large, bare, isolated rock as high as a Welsh
mountain and, as it seemed, quite uninhabited.
We were already in sight of the main range
of Atlas, and in the far ravines was a darkness
that might, perhaps, be made by cedar-trees,
but all around us was nothing but bare land

131

Story of the Lions

and now and then a glint from salt marshes
far away.

I asked him from what part of France he
had come. He answered that he was born
in the colony. Then I asked him whether
the colonists thought themselves prosperous
or no. He said, as do all sad people, that
luck was the difference. Those whom fortune
loved, prospered ; those whom she hated,
failed. He was right ; but when he came
to examples he was startling. He showed
me, high upon the rock before us, which I had
thought quite lonely, a considerable building,
made of the stones of the place and in colour
similar to the mountain itself. " Beyond
this hill," he said, " is Batna, and beyond
Batna is Lambese. Since you are walking
to Timgad you will pass both these places,
and everywhere you will hear of the House of
the Lions. Then you will learn, if ever you
needed proof, that it is luck which governs
all our efforts in this colony." I looked

132

Story of the Lions

curiously at the great house, and asked him
to tell me the story. This he did ; and I
write here, as exactly as I can from memory,
the story he told.

'' In that very place upon the hillside
where now stands so huge a house stood,
when we were yet children, a little hut of
stone such as the settlers build, with two
rooms in it only, a bed, three chairs, a table,
and a cooking-pot. And to this poverty
nothing was added, for ill-luck pursued that
roof.

" There lived under it a man and his wife
who had two children. They had come here
to rise with the country (as it is said), but,
instead of so rising, first one evil and then
another fell upon them till their little horde
was eaten up and the field also, and the
man had to work for others — a most miserable
fate. He got work in the building of the
prison of Lambese, but, as he was not created
by God to be a merchant or a mortar-mixer,

133

Story of the Lions

nor even a carrier of stone, he earned very
little and was always in dread of being sent
away ; and his companions jeered at him,
for the unfortunate are ridiculous not only
among the rich, but in every rank ; and not
only the rich jeer at poverty and shun it, but
the poor also — indeed, all men.

'' In a word, this man was in so miserable
a way that at last he took to following his
wife to church and to having recourse to
shrines, as do many men when their afflictions
are unendurable, and among other shrines he
went to that called ' St. Anthony of the Lion.'
Now, though it is ridiculous to believe that
the Lion there helped him, (for it is not a
saint,) yet good came to him through Lions.

'' One day, when he had gone off to work
with a heavy heart, leaving in the house but
one five-franc piece, his wife, who was now
all soured by misfortune and was wearied out
with ceaseless work, heard a single knock at
the door, and when she went to it she found

134

Story of the Lions

a nomad boy of the desert from beyond
Aures, who held in his arms two Httle cubs
with soft feet and peering eyes who were
mewing for their mother : they were the
cubs of Lions.

" The Arab boy, who was dark, erect, and
strong, said, ' God sends you these. They
are five francs.' She answered, ' God be
with you. I cannot pay.' When, however,
he made to go away silently, without bar-
gaining, she said, ' God forgive me, but I will
buy them ' ; for she thought to herself, * per-
haps I can sell them again for more,' for
Lions are rare and wonderful beasts. So she
took her five-franc piece from beneath a
leaden statue of St. Anthony in the window,
and she paid the Arab boy from beyond
Aures, from the Sahara, and she said, ' God
save you, the lioness will follow the scent ' ;
and he said, ' God will overshadow me,' and
went gravely away, biting the five-franc piece
to see if it was good.

135

Story of the Lions

" Now, when her husband came home thoy
decided to go into Batna and sell the cubs,
but their children, for whom they could afford
no sort of toy, were already so fond of the
little beasts that they had not the heart to
sell them : they skimped and starved and
ran into debt, but as the love of these Lions
increased in their hearts the more determined
were they to keep them ; and they used to
say, ' God will provide,' and other things
of that sort.

" The cubs, then, grew to be the size of
spaniels, and then they became grown and
were the size of hounds, and soon manes grew
on them and they were the size of St. Bernards,
and their eyes grew bright and shone at
evening ; and at last they were perfect Lions.
But from a long association with Christian
men they were genial, decorous, and loving,
and ate nothing but cooked meat, bread, and
now and then a sweetmeat. Also, they could
stand up and beg. They could roar at com-

136

Story of the Lions

mand. They could jump over each other's
backs; they could play as many tricks as a
dog. It was in this way that good came from
them.

'' For one day, when this man and his wife
were in a better mood and had forgotten
their poverty for an hour, there came to them
in the carrier's cart a parcel of wine sent them
by a relative who had a vineyard. This may
have been the turning of their luck : one
cannot tell. Luck is above mankind. But,
anyhow, they asked the carrier in and gave
him wine. Now the carrier was a Moham-
medan, and Mohammedans are treacherous,
so when he saw two Lions walking about in a
lonely house he did not call it witchcraft,
as would a Christian man, but at once he
offered a price for them; but the man and
his wife had hearts so good they would
not sell. Then the carrier changed his tune,
and offered to hire them for one week and
to pay for this fifty francs : this they gladly

137

Story of the Lions

accepted. For the carrier and men like him
are incapable of honour except in one small
thing, which is the keeping of words and
dates : in this they are most exact. So at
the end of the week he brought back the
Lions, and gave the man and his wife fifty
francs.

"But more was to come. For the carrier
(and men like him) see profit where a Christian
man would not see it, and he made a proposi-
tion to these people. He said : ' Your Lions
jump through hoops, they beg for sugar, and
do other entertaining things : now I will
travel with you and them, and half of all we
earn shall go to you.' The man and his
wife were so simple and so necessitous that
they accepted, and the tour began. But That
Which Watches Over Us at last rewarded the
man and his wife, for within a week the carrier
died, and they went on up and down the
country by themselves with their children,
showing the Lions, till they began to earn

138

Story of the Lions

incredible sums. They went to the great
towns and to the sea coast. At last they
became so rich that they went to Algiers,
and there it is, as you may imagine, large
rents but larger earnings. They lived in
Algiers for one year, and became at last so
rich that they crossed the sea and showed
their Lions in Provence, in Lyons, and would
have shown them in Paris but that, by the
time they reached Tournus, they came to
their own people and found themselves
rich enough. There the man and his
wife remained, but their children, who
had been born in Africa, came back,
and here they are now. They have friends
to dinner every day, and all on account of
Lions."

When he had done this story he added,
" It is true." Then we went on to Batna
together without a word, but when we reached
Batna we had dinner together and spoke of
many other things, but I have space for

139

The Bargaining at Batna

nothing except this story of his about the
Uons.

Having arrived at Batna, which is the
starting-place for Timgad and also for the
desert beyond, I found that there was a good
road which the French had built going along
a valley under Aures, but that the distance
was over twenty miles. I wasted the daylight
bargaining, for no one would drive me twenty
miles for less than sixteen shillings. It was
late, and in my eagerness to bargain I missed
the chance of a day-light march, for it
was within an hour of sunset when the night
driver who was to start on the Tebessa road
(which runs near Timgad) a little later refused
me. The poorer people whom I asked told
me that no one else was going eastward along
that lonely valley, but that, if I were to reach
Timgad, I must make a night march of it or
wait a night over in Batna itself at an inn.

Adventure is never to be refused, so I
140

Lamboesis

went out eastward alone under the evening,
and I was well rewarded, though I went
hungry for hours and was afoot nearly all
the way, for I saw a great sight under the
sunset, and I met a man I shall never meet
again.

The sight I saw was Lambese, which was
called Lamboesis by the Romans, and this is
what stamps it upon the mind of a lonely
man before nightfall : not what remains,
for hardly anything remains, but that the
fragments which remain of it should be so
far apart.

There is a sort of long cup or hollow here
pointing at a spur of the Atlas — that high
mountain which holds up the sky. The big
lift of Aures is on one side of this hollow,
mixing into the clouds, and on the other are
isolated and uninhabited high hills. The very
floor of this valley is as high as the top of
Cader Idris is in Wales ; the heights beyond
are as high as the Pyrenees ; and an air of

141

The Praetorian Tower

desertion haunts the place. It is impossible
to forget that the Sahara is near by, down
beyond the crest of the range. For though
the land is muddy and the sky full of rough
clouds and rain, yet the rain seems to make no
grass and the land is bare. In such a world
there stands up before one a square and
hardly ruined, tower.

A man of northern Europe looking at
this thing from the high road cannot but
think it Jacobean (if he is English) or (if he
is German or French) a thing of the Thirty
Years' War. It might be later perhaps, the
freak of some Highland landlord or the relic
of some local rebellion. It is older than our
language by far, and almost older than the
Faith. As one looks at it one cannot feel
but only know its age, and one watches it
up an avenue of stones wondering why it
stands so lonely. But one's wonder has no
stuff in it till one goes on half a mile and
more : by the roadside is a pile of Roman

142

The Vastness of Lambese

stones. These also stood in Lamboesis. Then,
feehng himself yet within the walls of an un-
seen city, a man looks back over the stretch
he has come and is appalled. In such a gaze
you look westward towards the light beyond
the mountains. The valley is already dark.
The high road which the French have made
glistens as hard as stone under the last light.
Trees are still visible, especially the few
mournful and hard pyramids of the cypress,
but the little village, the modern prison (for
there is a prison), and the rare labourers here
and there are muffled up in twilight ; and
there lies before one a mere emptiness, beyond
which, a long way off, dwindled to quite
little, is the Praetorian Tower. A sharp
memory of childhood from beyond years of
common experience so strikes the mind.

The spread plain with its one central
tower seems infinite ; it is now without
hedges or trees or roofs or men ; but once
the Legion had filled up everything.

143

The Driver Passes

It was all quite bare as I surveyed it —
more bare than a heath or a down, and as
large as any landscape you may know.

While I was watching this empty space,
and surmising what contrast it would make
with the famous and crowded ruins of Timgad
to which this Lamboesis had been a neigh-
bouring city, as Chichester is to Arundel —
or, better still, as Portsmouth and its arma-
ment is to Southampton and its trade — I
heard the rumble of heavy and fast wheels,
and a man driving a coach passed me and
then pulled up at my hail. He was the same
man who had refused my bargain an hour and
more before. He was driving the night
coach to Tebcssa. Not understanding men,
he raised his price. I told him that I would
pay him only what I had offered at Batna,
less the price of the miles I had gone. He
would not yield, but he did these three things :
first, he promised to send word, as he passed,
to an old Soldier who kept a house near

144

The Cold

Timgad that a traveller was on the road ;
secondly, he gave me advice, telling me that
I should freeze to death by night in that
valley (for it was growing cold and the
weather would not hold under such a sky) ;
thirdly, he informed me of the exact distance,
which was at the thirty-second stone, where
there is a branch road to the right, leading in
half an hour up the slopes of the range to
Timgad. Then he drove on, and I spent
what was left of a doubtful light in pressing
onwards.

A great mass of snow had recently covered
the peaks, and in the valley up which I was
trudging freezing gusts and very sharp scurries
of cold rain disturbed the traveller. I had
already passed the last ruins of the Romans
and had seen, far off in the dusk, the last arch
of the Legions standing all alone with one
big tree beside it. The west was wild-red
under the storm, and it was cut hke a fret

145 K

The Arab

with the jagged edge of the Sierras, quite
black, when I saw against the purple of a
nearer hill the white cloak of an Arab.

He drove a little cart — a light cart with
two wheels. His horse was of such a sort
as you may buy any day in Africa for ten

]f»

■r-?- «r- "^'

ex-

pounds, that is, it was gentle, strong, swift,
and small, and looked in the half-light as
though it did not weigh upon the earth but
as though it were accustomed to running over
the tops of the sea. I said to the Arab :
" Will you not give me a lift ? " He an-
swered : '* If it is the will of God." Hearing

so excellent an answer, and finding myself a

146

The Arab

part of universal fate, I leapt into his cart
and he drove along through the gloaming,
and as he went he sang a little song which
had but three notes in it, and each of these
notes was divided from the next by only a
quarter of a note. So he sang, and so I sat
by his side.

At last he saw that it was only right to
break into talk, if for no other reason than
that I was his guest ; so he said quite sud-
denly, looking straight before him :

" I am very rich."

"I," said I, ** am moderately poor."

At this he shook his head and said : "I
am more fortunate than you ; I am very,
very rich." He then wagged his head again
slowly from side to side and was silent for a
good minute or more.

He next said slyly, with a mixture of
curiosity and politeness : "My Lord, when
you say you are poor you mean poor after
the manner of the Romans, that is, with no

147

The Arab

money in your pocket but always the power
to obtain it."

" No," said I, "I have no land, and
not even the power of which you speak. I
am really, though moderately, poor. All
that I get I earn by talking in public places
in the cold weather, and in spring time and
summer by writing and by other tricks." He
looked solemn for a moment, and then said :
" Have you, indeed, no land ? " I said " No "
again ; for at that moment I had none. Then
he replied : "I have sixteen hundred acres
of land."

When he had said this he tossed back his

head in that lion-like way they have, for they

are as theatrical as children or animals, and

he went on : " Yes, and of these one-fourth

is in good fruit-trees . . . they bear . . .

they bear ... I cannot contain myself for

well-being." " God give you increase," said

L "A good word," said he, " and I would

say the same to you but that you have nothing

148

The Arab

to increase with. However, it is the will of
God. ' To one man it comes, from another
it goes/ said the Barber, and again it is said,
' Which of you can be certain ? ' "

These last phrases he rattled off like a
lesson with no sort of unction : it was evi-
dently a form. He then continued :

" I have little rivulets running by my
trees. He - from - whom - 1 - bought had let
them go dry ; I nurtured them till they
sparkled. They feed the roots of my orchard.
I am very rich. Some let their walls fall
down ; I prop them up ; nay, sometimes I
rebuild. All my roofs are tiled with tiles
from Marseilles. ... I am very rich." Then
I took up the psalm in my turn, and I
said :

" What is it to be rich if you are not
also famous ? Can you sing or dance or
make men laugh or cry by your recitals ?
I will not ask if you can draw or sculpture,
for your religion forbids it, but do you play

149

The Arab

the instrument or the flute ? Can you put
together wise phrases which are repeated by
others ? "

To this he answered quite readily : "I
have not yet attempted to do any of these
things you mention : doubtless were I to try
them I should succeed, for I have become very
rich, and a man who is rich in money from
his own labour could have made himself rich
in any other thing."

When he said this I appreciated from
whence such a doctrine had invaded England.
It had come from the Orientals. I listened to
him as he went on : " But it is no matter ;
my farm is enough for me. If there were
no men with farms, who would pay for
the flute and the instrument and the wise
beggar and the rest ? Ah ! who would
feed them ? " *

" None," said I, " you are quite right."
So we went quickly forward for a long time
under the darkness, saying nothing more

150

The Arab

until a thought moved him. " My father
was rich," he said, " but I am far richer than
my father."

It was cold, and I remembered what a
terrible way I had to go that night — twenty
miles or more through this empty land of
Africa. So I was shivering as I answered :
" Your father did well in his day, and through
him you are rich. It says, * Revere your
father : God is not more to you.' " He
answered : " You speak sensibly ; I have
sons." Then for some time more we rode
along upon the high wheels.

But in a few minutes the lights of a low
steading appeared far off under poplar-trees,
and as he waved his hand towards it he said :
" That is my farm." " Blessed be your farm,"
said I, " and all who dwell in it." To this he
made the astonishing reply : " God will give
it to you ; I have none." " What is that
you say ? " I asked him in amazement. He
repeated the phrase, and then I saw that it

151

The Arab

was a form, and that it was of no importance
whether I understood it or not. But I under-
stood the next thing which he said as he
stopped at his gates, which was : " Here,
then, you get out." I asked him what I
should pay for the service, and he repUed :
"What you will. Nothing at all." So I
gave him a franc, which was all I had in silver.
He took it with a magnificent salutation,
saying as he did so : "I can accept nothing
from you," which, I take it, was again a
form. Then the night swallowed him up,
and I shall never see him again till that
Great Day in which we both believed but of
which neither of us could know anything
at all.

We were born, I cannot tell how many
leagues apart, in different climates and for
different destinies, but we were two men
together in the night, and, for a short time,
we were very near each other compared with

152

The Goat-Story again

the distance of the stars^ or with the distance
that separates any two philosophers.

4: H: H: 4: H:

Many who read this will say they know
the Mohammedan better than I. They will
be right : then let them explain the story
of the goats, for I cannot. I will repeat it
to save them the trouble of turning back.

A young man of Ain-Yagout, hearing that
the Government had carefully planted little
cedars on a distant hill, drove his goats fifteen
miles to browse upon the same. " Better," said
he, " that I should flourish than the Govern-
ment, and that my goats should give milk than
that these silly little trees should fatten."

They caught him and brought him before
the magistrate, where he confessed what he
had done, and even that he had lifted the
goats laboriously, one by one, over a high
wall to get at the Government trees. But
when they asked him what good reason he
could give for his conduct, he replied :

153

The Moor

" R'ahof It was the will of God. Mek-
toub, it was written."

Or words to that effect.

I will admit that when the full lips, the
long uncertain eye and the tall forehead of
the true Arab met me in these short travels
I was always half silenced and half moved
to question and to learn. But I saw such
Oriental features rarely, for, in spite of the
turban and the bernous, they are very rare.

Indeed, of all the men I came across in
this country, only two were of the purely
Oriental kind the books make out to be so
common. One was a fierce Moor of gigantic
stature and incredible girth. He was dressed
in bright green, and drank the cordial called
cr^me de menthe in a little bower. The other
was a poor Arab and old, who sold fruits
upon a stall in Setif. In his face there was
a deep contempt of Christendom.

The snow fell all around him swiftly,
mixed with sleet and sharp needles of cold

154

The Little Old Semite

rain. It was evening and the people were

passing down the street hurriedly to find

their homes : so passed I, when I saw him

standing like a little stunted ghost in the

rain. He knew me at once for some one to

whom Africa was strange, and therefore might

have hoped to make me stop even upon such

a night to buy of him. Yet he did not say

a word, but only looked at me as

much as to say: "Fool!

will you buy ? " And I *^\

looked back at him as I ^' '^

passed, and put my answer x.«s^ - '

into my eyes as much as to ir'^-

say: "No! Barbarian, I i^Ui.^^.^.

will not buy." In this way

we met and parted, and we shall never see

each other again till that Great Day . . .

% 4: He N( sfi

Remembering him and this last one who
had given me a ride, I went on through the
night towards Timgad.

155

The Lonely Night March

It was a very lonely road.

Loneliness, when it is absolute, is very
difficult to depict, for it is a negation and
lacks quality, and therefore words fail it.
But one may express the loneliness of that
valley best by saying that it felt, not as
though men had deserted it, but as though
men had perpetually tried to return to it and,
as perpetually, had despaired and left the
sullen earth. The impression was false. The
Romans had once thoroughly possessed and
tilled this land : the scrub had once been
forests, the shifting soil ordered and bounded
fields ; but the Mohammedan sterility had
sunk in so deeply that one could not believe
that our people had ever been here. Even
the sharp and recent memory of those ruins
of Lamboesis faded in the stillness. Europe
came back into my mind. The full rivers
and the fields which are to us a natural land-
scape are but a made garden and are due to
continuous tradition, and I wondered whether,

156

The Lonely Night March

if that tradition were finally lost, our sons
would come to see, in England as I saw here
in the night in Africa, vague hills without trees
and drifts of mould and sand through which
the rain-bursts would dig deep channels at
random.

There was a moon risen by this time, but
it lay behind a level flow of clouds. All along
the way, to my right, made smaller by the
darkness, lay Aures — one could still just
discern the snow upon his summits. The
road went on — French, exact, and, if I may
say so, alien — bridging this barbaric- void
which already smelt of the desert where it
lay beyond those mountains down under the
southern wall of Atlas. For the desert, when
I had seen Timgad, I determined to strike.

So the road went on, and I with it till I
came to the thirty-second stone, and recog-
nised its number by holding a match close by.
Then I knew that I had covered twenty miles
and was close to Timgad. A branch road

The Columns of Timgad

opened out on the right, and there was a
sign-post pointing along it. I followed the
new road across a careful girder bridge such
as might cross a brook in Normandy. I saw
a light up on the rise of the foot-hills, and
beyond it, suddenly and yet dimly, a very
mob of columns. They stood up against the
vague glimmer of the sky of every size and in
thousands, as though they were marching.
A little rift in the clouds let in the moon upon
them palely . Her light was soon extinguished,
but in that moment I had seen a large city,
unroofed and dead, in the middle of this
wasted land.

However men may act who see a vision
but see it in extreme fatigue, so did I. I
suffered the violent impression of that ghost,
but my curiosity was no longer of the body.
I took no step to see the wonder which this
gleam had hinted at, but I turned and struck
at the door of the house which was now quite
near me, and which was still lit within. An

158

The Old Soldier

old man, small, bent, and full of energy,
opened the door to me. He was that soldier
of whom they had told me at Lambese.

" I was expecting you," he said.

I remembered that the driver had pro-
mised to warn him, and I was grateful.

" I have prepared you a meal," he went
on. Then, after a little hesitation, " It is
mutton : it is neither hot nor cold."

A man who has been on guard as often
as had this old sergeant need not mind
awakening in the small hours, and a man who
has marched twenty miles and more in the
dark must eat what he is given, though it be
sheep and tepid. So I sat down. He brought
me their very rough African wine and a loaf,
and sat down opposite me, looking at me
fixedly under the candle. Then he said :

" To-morrow you will see Timgad, which
is the most wonderful town in the world."

"Certainly not to-night," I answered;
to which he said, " No ! "

159

The Strange Food

I took a bite of the food, and he at once
continued rapidly : " Timgad is a marvel.
We call it ' the marvel.' I had thought of
calling this house ' Timgad the Marvel/ or,
again, ' Timgad the ' "

" Is this sheep ? " I said.

" Certainly," he answered. " What else
could it be but sheep ? "

" Good Lord ! " I said, " it might be
anything. There is no lack of beasts on
God's earth." I took another bite and found
it horrible.

" I desire you to tell me frankly," said
I, " whether this is goat. There are many
Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any
man for giving me goat's flesh. The Hebrew
prophets ate it and the Romans ; only tell
me the truth, for goat is bad for me."

He said it was not goat. Indeed, I
believed him, for it was of a large and terrible
sort, as though it had roamed the hills and
towered above all goats and sheep. I thought

1 60

The Strange Food

of lions, but remembered that their value
would forbid their being killed for the table. I
again attempted the meal, and he again began :

" Timgad is a place "

At this moment a god inspired me, and
I shouted, " Camel ! " He did not turn a
hair. I put down my knife and fork, and
pushed the plate away. I said :

" You are not to be blamed for giving me
the food of the country, but for passing it
under another name."

He was a good host, and did not answer.
He went out, and came back with cheese.
Then he said, as he put it down before me :

; _" I do assure you it is sheep," and we
discussed the point no more.

But in the hour that followed we spoke
of many things — of the army (which he
remembered), of active service (which he
regretted, for he had lost half a hand), of
money (which he loved), and of the Church —
which he hated. He was good to the bottom

l6l L

TiMGAD

of his soul. His face was sad. He had most
evidently helped the poor, he had fought hard
and gained his independence, and there he
was under Aures, in a neglected place a
thousand miles away from his own people,
talking French talk of disestablishment and
of the equality of all opinion before the law.
So we talked till the camel (or sheep) was stiff
in its plate and cold, and the first glimmer
of dawn had begun to sadden the bare room
and to oppress the yellow light of the candle.
Then he took me to a room, and as I went I
saw from a window, beyond a garden he had
planted, the awful sight of Timgad, utterly
silent and ruined, stretching a mile under the
dull morning ; and with that sight still con-
trolling me I fell heavily asleep.

When the morning came I looked out
again from my window and I saw the last
of the storm still hurrying overhead, and
beneath and before me, of one even grey colour
and quite silent, the city of Timgad. There

162

TiMGAD

was no one in it alive. There were no roofs
and no criers. It was all ruins standing up
everywhere : broken walls and broken columns
absolutely still, except in one place where
some pious care had led the water back to its
old channels. There a little fountain ran
from an urn that a Cupid held.

I passed at once through the gates and
walked for perhaps an hour, noting curiously

i-^

t

11

a hundred things : the shop-stalls and the
lines of pedestals ; the flag-stones of the
Forum and the courses of brick — even, small,
Roman and abandoned. I walked so, gazing

163

TiMGAD

sometimes beyond the distant limits of the
city to the distant slopes of Atlas, till I came
to a high place where the Theatre had once
stood, dug out of a hillside and built in with
rows of stone seats. Here I sat down to draw
the stretch of silence before me, and then I
recognised for the first time that I was very
tired.

I said to myself : " This comes of my
long march through the night"; but when I
had finished my drawing and had got up to
walk again (for one might walk in Timgad for
many days, or for a lifetime if one chose) I
found a better reason for my fatigue, which
was this : that, try as I would I could not
walk firmly and strongly upon those deserted
streets or across the flags of that Forum, but
I was compelled by something in the town
to tread uncertainly and gently. When I
recollected myself I would force my feet to
a natural and ready step ; but in a moment,
as my thoughts were taken by some new

164

TiMGAD

aspect of the place, I found myself walking
again with strain and care, noiselessly, as
one does in shrines, or in the room of a sleeper
or of the dead. It was not I that did it, but
the town.

I saw, some hundred yards away, a man
going to his field along a street of Timgad :
he showed plainly for the houses had sunk
to rubble upon either side of his way. This
was the first life I had seen under that stormy
mountain morning, and in that lonely place
which had been lonely for so very long. He
also walked doubtfully and with careful
feet ; he looked downward and made no
sound.

I went up and down Timgad all that
morning. The sun was not high before I
felt that by long wandering between the
columns and peering round many corners
and finding nothing, one at last became
free of the city. An ease and a familiarity,
a sort of friendship with abandoned but

.165

TiMGAD

once human walls, took the traveller as he
grew used to the silence ; but whether in such
companionship he did not suffer some evil
influence, I cannot say.

I came to one place and to another and
to another, each quite without men, and each
casting such an increasing spell upon the mind
as is cast by voices heard in the night, when
one does not know whether they are of the
world, or not of the world.

I came to a triumphal arch which had
once guarded the main entry to the city from
Lamboesis and the west. It was ornate,
four-sided, built, one would think, in the
centuries of the decline. Beyond it, the
suburbs into which the city expanded just
before it fell stretched far out into the plain.
Not far from it a very careful inscription
recalled a man who has thus survived as he
wished to survive ; the sacred tablet testified
to the spirit which unites the religion of anti-
quity with our own — for it was chiselled in

i66

TiMGAD

fulfilment of a vow. In another place was the
statue of the gods' mother, crowned with a

towers. This also
decline, but still
serenity which
before the Bar-
a and the sack

%

m

x^.

wall and
was of the
full of that
faces wore
barian march
of cities.

There is
a crossing of
the streets in
T i m g a d
where one
may sit a long
time and con-
sider her de-
solation upon every
seclusion is absolute,
presence of so many made things with none
to use them gradually invades the mind.
The sun gives life to you as you look down
this Decumanian way, and see the runnels

167

TiMGAD

where the wheels ran once noisily to the
market ; it warms you but it nourishes for

you no companions. The town stares at you
and is blind.
Against the sky, upon a little mound, stand

i68

TiMGAD

two tall columns, much taller than the rest.

They shine under the low winter sun from

every part of Timgad and are white over the

plain of grey stones. They may have been

raised for the Temple of Capitoline Jove.

These will detain the traveller for as

long as he may choose to regard them, so

violently do they impress him with the

negation of time. It is said that in certain

abnormal moods things infinitely great and

infinitely little are present together in the

mind : that vast spaces of the imagination

and minute contacts of the finger-tips are

each figured in the brain, the one not driving

out the other. In such moods (it is said)

proportion and reality grow faint, and the

unity and poise of our limited human powers

are in peril. Into such a mood is a man thrown

by Timgad, and especially by these two pillars

of white stone. They proceed so plainly

from the high conceptions of man : so much

were their sculptors what we are in every

169

TiMGAD

western character : so fully do they satisfy
us : so recent and clean is the mark of the
tool upon them that they fill a man with
society and leave him ready to meet at once
a living city full of his fellows. It only needs
a spoken word or the clack of a sandal to be
back into the moment when all these things
were alive. And meanwhile, with that im-
pression overpowering one's sense, there,
physically present, is a desolation so com-
plete that measure fails it. No oxen moving :
no smoke : no roof among the rare trees of
the horizon : no gleam of water and no sound.
It is as though not certain centuries but an
incalculable space of days coexisted with
the present, and as though, for one eternal
moment, a vision of the absolute in which
time is not were permitted — for no good —
to the yet embodied soul.

I do not know what was the hour in which
I turned and left this sight, and leaving by
the southern gate made for the mountain

170

The Stranger

range of Aures. But it was yet early after-
noon, and the track had risen but Httle into
the hills when I saw, some little way off,
seated upon a great squared stone which had
lain there since the departure of our people,
a man of a kind I had not met in Africa
before.

By his dress he was rather a colonist
than a native, for he wore no turban — indeed
his head was bare ; but his long cloak was
cut in an unusual shape, covering him almost
entirely ; it was dark and made of some stuff
that had certainly not been woven in a modern
loom. He saluted me as I came.

When I approached him and saluted him
in return, his face could be seen inspired with
a peculiar power, which, at a distance, his
attitude alone had discovered. It was not
easy to be sure whether its lines were drawn
from Italy or from those rare exceptions
wherein the east seems sometimes to surpass
our own race in force and dignity. His

171

The Stranger

forehead was low and very broad, his hair
short, crisp, strong, and of the colour of steel ;
his lips, which were thin and controlled, had
in their firm outline something of a high sad-
ness, and his whole features recalled those
which tradition gives to the makers and de-
stroyers of religions. But it was his eyes that
gave him so singular and (as I can still believe
though the adventure is now long past) so
magical an influence. These were in colour
like the sea in March, grey-green and full of
light, or like some mountain stones which
when they are polished show the same trans-
lucent and natural hue, shining from within
with vivid changes ; but, much more than
their luminous colour, their expression arrested
me, for it had in it an experience of immense
horizons, and resembled that which may
sometimes be caught in the eyes of birds who
have seen the earth from the heights of
the sky.

I first spoke and asked him whether I
172

The Stranger

was well upon the path that would lead me
under Aures, through the pass, to the sandstone
hills from whose summits one could see the
desert for which I was bound.

Whether Timgad had disturbed me, or
his speech had in it that something which
at the time I feared, I cannot tell ; but the
very short dialogue we had together influ-
enced me in my loneliness for a whole day,
as a vivid dream will do. I will therefore
write it down.

He rose and answered me that I was
on a good path all the way, and that there
was plenty of lodging : that the road was
safe, and that my map would be an ample
guide.

" From the other side of Aures," he said,
" you will see one ridge of red rocks beyond
another. Even the furthest has some scrub
upon it upon this side, but from its summit
you will see the desert, and on this side it is
easy to climb."

173

The Stranger

Myself : " And how is the southern side
towards the Sahara ? "

He : "It is all precipice, but from the
northern side you can cast about and find a
path which creeps down the end of the ridge
to an oasis of palm-trees. These are very
numerous and evident from the height.
When you reach them you will find a large
river flowing towards the desert, a great road
and a railway. It is easy to return."

All this I knew already from my reading,
and from my map, but I listened to him for
the sake of the tones of his voice : these had
a sort of laugh in them when he added that
I should be glad to get back to water, to
trees and to men.

Myself : " But there is, as you say
and know, no danger on this road from the
tribes or from beasts."

He : " No. Very little."

Myself : " What other danger can there
be ? "

174

The Stranger

He answered that many who saw the
desert learnt more than they desired to
learn.

I knew very well what he meant for I had
heard many men maintain that what was
eternal must be changeless, and that what was
changeless must be dead. And I had noted
how men who had travelled widely were more
simple in the Faith if they had chiefly known
the sea ; but if they had chiefly known the
desert, more subtle and often emptied of
the Faith at last : the Faith dried up out of
them as the dews are dried up out of the sand
on the edges of the Sahara in the brazen morn-
ings. But these men, speaking in Christendom,
had affected me little ; here, so near the waste
places where men cannot live, alone with
such a companion, I felt afraid.

We walked along together slowly for a
few paces ; his sentences were shorter than
my replies, and were spoken low, and full of
what he and his call wisdom, but I, despair.

175

The Stranger

We discussed together in these brief moments
the chief business of mankind. It was a
power much greater than his words that put
my mind into a turmoil, though his words
were careful and heavy. . . . He told me
that the day was better than the night. The
daylight was a curtain and a cheat, but when
it was gone you could see the dreadful hollow.

Myself : "In Sussex, which is my home,
if a man were asked which was the more
beneficent, he would say * the night.' "

*' In Sussex," he answered gently (as
though he knew the Downs) "mists and kind
airs continue the veil of the day." He said
that in the desert the stars were terrible to
man, and as he spoke of the endless distances
I remembered the old knowledge (but this
time alive with conviction) how great nations,
as they advance with unbroken records and
heap up experience, and test life by their
own past, and grow to judge exactly the
enlarging actions of men, see at last that

176

The Stranger

there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose

is only in themselves. Their Faiths turn to

legend, and at last they enter that shrine

whose God has departed and whose Idol is

quite blind.

We had not talked thus for twenty

minutes when we stopped at the edge of a

little wood, and, as his way was not mine,

he made to return. We both turned back

to look at the plain below us, and the salt

dull valley and the dead town : the broken

columns and the long streets of Timgad,

made small by the distance and all in one

group together. I looked at him as he stood

there and the fantastic thought half took me

that he had known the city while it was yet

loud with men. When he had left me the

oppression of his awful intensity and of his

fixed unnatural reason began to fade. I saw

him go into a secchia ; I saw him again upon

the further side swinging powerfully down

the slope. He' crossed another fold of land,

177 M

The Walk to the Desert

he showed upon the crest beyond, and after
that I did not see him again.

Then I turned and went up into Atlas,
and as I went I was in two minds, but at last
tradition conquered and I was safe in my
own steadfast instincts, settling back as
settles back with shorter and shorter oscilla-
tions some balanced rock which violence
has disturbed. The vast shoulder of Aures
seemed worthy indeed of awe, but not of
terror. I made a companion of the snow,
and I was glad to remember how many living
things moved under the forest trees.

So I continued for three days seeing
many things, and drawing them till I came
to the south side where the streams go down
to be lost at last in the sand, and till I saw
before me the sandstone ridge red and bare,
and from its summit looked out upon a chang-
ing landscape, which dried and flattened and
became the true desert where miles and miles

away a line quite hard and level marked the

178

The Sight of the Desert

extreme horizon. On this summit I lay in
the shelter of a rock (for it was bitterly cold
and a violent wind blew off the snows of
Aur^s) and looked a long time southward
upon the country which is the prison-wall
of our race.

The man near Timgad had said truly
that the end of the Empire, the division and
the boundary, was abrupt.

A precipice falls sharply right against
the midday sun ; it is built up of those red
rocks whose colour adds so much to the evil
silence of the Sahara, and the ridge-top of this
precipice is here a sharp dividing-line between
living and desert land. Africa the province,
the Maghreb full of towns and men, ends in
a coast, as it were, against this blinding
ocean of sand. You look down from its cliffs
over a vast space much more inhuman than
the sea. Behind the traveller stretches all
the table-land he has traversed, bare indeed
and strange to a northerner, but very habit-

179

The View of the Desert

able and sown with large cities, living and
dead. There are behind him trees, many
animals and rain : all the diversity of a
true climate and a long-cultivated soil.
Before him are sharp reefs of stone, un-
weathered, without moss, and with harsh
unrounded corners split by the furnace-
days and the dreadful frosts of the desert.
The rocks emphasise the wild desert as reefs
do the wild of the sea : they rise out of sand
that blows and shifts under the wind.

On this day, as I took my first long look
at the Sahara, Aures and the plateau beyond
were all piled up with dark clouds, and one
could see showers sweeping like shadowy
curtains over the distant forests to the north-
ward ; but southward over the desert there
was a sky like a cup of blue steel, and a
dazzling sunlight that made more desperate
the desperate iciness of the gale. When I
could tolerate the cold no longer I began to
pick my way carefully downward,

i8o

The Oasis

I could not find any path such as the
man at Timgad had told me of, and such as
my map showed, but what I had to do was
clear, for down in the plain below me a long
line of palms marked an oasis and the
passage of that clear river which, as I knew,
comes tumbling down from the Atlas to be
lost at last in the Sahara. No feature in the
unusual view below me was more characteristic
than this : that green leaves were thus
bunched together, rare, isolated and excep-
tional, as with us are waste rocks or heaths,
while the wide sweep of the land, which with
us is all fields and trees and boundaries, here
is abandoned altogether. It was not the
least part of my wonder in this new place
to find myself walking as I chose over an
earth that was quite barren, with no history,
no obstacles, and no owner, towards a patch
of human land whose grove looked as an
island looks from the sea. As I neared those
palms I found first the railway, and then the

i8i

The Arab Riding

strong high road which the astonishing
French have driven right out here into
nothingness.

I did not turn to enter the native village.
I had no appetite to see more of the desert
than I had seen in my view from the hill.
I had then seen a limit beyond which men
of my sort cannot go, and I was content to
leave it to those others who will remain
for ever the enemies of our Europe. I saw
one on the road : a true Arab, what the French
call " An Arab of the Great Tent," not what
we and the Algerians are, but a rider of that
race which makes one family from the Persian
Gulf to the Atlantic. He was on a horse
going up before me into the hills, with
the snow of Aures above him, and between
us a tall palm. As I watched him and
admired his stately riding, I said to myself :
" This is how it will end : they shall leave us
to our vineyards, our statues, and our harbour-
towns, and we will leave them to their desert

182

The Arab Riding
here beyond the hills, for it is their native

W- /'<

place. . . . Then we shall have reached our
goal, for we shall be back where the Romans

183

The Ksar

were, and the empire will be fully restored.
For all things return at last to their origins,
and Europe must return to hers. They must

forget our cities which they ruined, and
which we are so painfully rebuilding, and
we will not covet their little glaring ksours
which they, build upon crags above the desert,
and which are quite white in the sun. . , .
This is how it will end."

When I came to that curious cleft or
gorge through which the river, the road and
the railway all make their way together, one
above the other, from the plateau down into
the desert plain, I saw a Christian house after

184

The Return

so many miles and days. I went in at once,

drank wine, and asked the hour of the train,

for I was tired of this

land. I was hurrying to

get back to reasonable

shrines, and to smell

the sea.

\ " Very soon," I

said to myself, " I

shall come back to

the coast-harbours,

and I shall see

again all the

business of
the ship-
ping and the waves ; and I shall see, rounding
the pier-heads, those happy boats which seem

i8s

The Last Bargain

to be part of the mist and of the very early
morning." So it was ; for I came at the close
of a bright day through the hills of the Tell
to the sea : here was the Mediterranean, and
here were all the sails. I saw again the little
harbour by which I had entered Africa, and
I was glad to find such a choice of ships at

the quays, ready, as it seemed, to go to all
parts of the world. So I chose one that was
a Spaniard, bound for Palma in Majorca,
and I drove a bargain by which I was to go
for next to nothing, provided I stayed on
deck, and ate none of their food.

When I had driven this bargain, I bought
wine, bread and meat ashore, and came back
and took a place right up in the bows from

i86

The Last Bargain

which to watch the sea. It was the afternoon
when we cast off and left the harbour, and
before it was quite dark we had lost the land.
I lay there for many hours in the bows, and
thought about my home. And as I went
across the sea I recalled those roofs built for
true winters, and those great fireplaces of
my own land. I also thought of the thick,
damp woods which begin by Tay and
go on to Roncesvalles, but which north or
south of these are never seen ; I remembered
Europe well. There were women there (to
whom I was sailing) whose eyes were clear
and simple, and whose foreheads low ; I
remembered that all their gestures were
easy. I remembered that in the harbours
men would meet me kindly ; I was to meet
my own people again, and their ritual would
not seem to be ritual because it would be
my own, and the air would be full of bells.
The ship also, going eagerly onwards dead
north under the stars ; she carried me towards

187

The Memory of Europe

my native things^ herself reaching her own
country, for nothing ahen to Europe could
make or preserve the science that had con-
structed such engines and such a hull.

" In Europe, in the river-valleys," I
thought, "I will rest and look back, as upon
an adventure, towards my journey in this
African land. I shall be free of travel. I
shall be back home. I shall come again to
inns and little towns. I shall see railways
(of which I am very fond), and I shall hear
and see nothing that the Latin Order has not
made." I thought about all these things
as the ship drove on.

Europe filled me as I looked out over
the bows, and I saluted her though she could
not see me nor I her. I considered how she
had made us all, how she was our mother and
our author, and how in that authority of
hers and of her religion a man was free.
On this account, although I had no wine
(for I had drunk it long before and thrown

i88

And her Toast

the bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to
her destiny. I had just come back from the
land which Europe had reconquered, and
which, please God, she shall continually hold,
and I said to myself, " Remain for ever."

" We pass. There is nothing in ourselves
that remains. But do you remain for ever.
What happens to this life of ours, which we
had from you, Salvd Fide, I cannot tell :
save that it changes and is not taken away.
They say that nations perish and that at last
the race itself shall decline ; it is better for
us of the faith to believe that you are pre-
served, and that your preservation is the
standing grace of this world."

It was in this watch of the early morning

that I called out to her " Esto perpetua ! "

which means in her undying language : " You

shall not die "•; and remembering this I have

determined to give my rambling book that

title.

*****

189

It Dawns

In a little while it began to be
dawn ; but as yet I saw no land. I
saw before me a boundary of waters
tumbling all about, but I did not feel
alone upon that sea. I felt rather as a
man feels on some lake inland, knowing
well that there is governed country upon
every side.

This is the way in which a man
leaves Africa and comes back to the shore
which Christendom has never lost.

But all the while as he goes from Africa
northwards, steering for the Balearics and
the harbours of Spain, he remembers that
other iron boundary of the Sahara which
shuts us in, and the barrier against which his
journey struck and turned. The silence
permits him to recall most vividly the last
of the oases under Atlas upon the edge of
the wild.

There, where the fresh torrent that has
nourished the grove is already sinking, stag-

190

The End

nant and brackish, to its end, a little palm-
tree lives all alone and cherishes its life.
Beyond it there is nothing whatsoever but
the line of the sand.

FINIS

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Belloc. Hilaire
Esto perpetua : Algerian
studies and impressions
47159123 _^